


It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City

by Eatsscissors



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, D/s, F/M, Family Drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-04
Updated: 2010-10-04
Packaged: 2017-10-12 10:24:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 15
Words: 71,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/123877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eatsscissors/pseuds/Eatsscissors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bonnie is in this to make certain that Grams didn't die for nothing. She's pretty sure that Damon just likes to kill things.  AU after "Blood Brothers", but still contains elements through the S1 finale. Deeply AU for the second season.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks go out to Workinprogress for her fantastic, insightful beta job (and very little whip-cracking!), and to Penny for going above and beyond as a mod in a sticky situation.

Bonnie chose a time when the sun would be high in the sky for their meeting, and also a crowded place. She didn't know why; it wasn't as if the sunlight was going to hurt him unless she could get that ring off (she thought long, hard, and not without temptation about whether she could use her newly-learned telekinesis to get that ring off, but then he wouldn't be able to help her, and that would kind of kill the whole plan right there), and she doubted that he would attack her where people could see and run him out of town. Maybe it was so that she wouldn't attack him. Aunt Pamela and cousin Kayla had been fairly stern about her responsibility not to use her powers where people not already in the know could see them, when she had been staying with them after the funeral and alternating between crying until her face hurt and learning all that she could learn.

Still. She could keep her fantasies.

Bonnie leaned up against her car, arms folded across her chest and fingers tapping restlessly against her elbow, as Damon finally strolled up to The Grill's parking lot. She hadn't given him a hard and fast time, knowing that he would probably delight in skipping past it just to piss her off, but had told him that it was in both of their interests for him to meet her as soon as possible. She had also been sure to wait a good five days after the incident at the Miss Mystic Falls pageant before she made her call. By that time, either Stefan was on his way back up or he was too gone to bring back, and Damon would have an entirely different reason for helping her.

"'It's in both of our interests'?" Damon quoted back to her as he paused for half a second a respectful distance back and then seemed to decide that he liked the view from way up in her space a lot better. Less than six months before, Damon had been able to make her run away by trying to loom over her like that, but that had been six months before. Bonnie continued tapping her fingers against her elbow and stared him down as he continued, "Did you spend your little vacation reading spy novels or something?"

Bonnie glowered. "I have a proposition for you," she said before she put her hand against Damon's chest and bodily pushed him back after he had proven that he didn't have the good sense to do it on his own.

" _Bad_ spy novels," Damon added. Even with Bonnie's hand against his chest, he could lean forward and remind her that he was still a lot taller and bigger than she. She evened the odds by sending the subtlest of warning flares through his head until he rocked back onto his heels, one corner of his mouth turning up in a way that did not suggest good thoughts going through his mind. If she and Stefan had been anywhere near friends, Bonnie would have pulled him to the side the next time that she saw him and told him that his brother did some of the weirdest things with his face sometimes. "You might have piqued my interest enough to get me out here, witch, but spill it. I have places to be."

So Stefan wasn't quite all better, then, and Damon was worried enough about him to want to get back. Bonnie thought, anyway; her skills in translating the language of Damon had all come to her second-hand, from listening to Elena and Caroline. Lucky for Damon, then, that the language of Bonnie was much more straightforward. "I'm going after the rest of the tomb vampires," she said. "I want you to help me."

Damon rocked back onto his heels again. "Be sure to leave Elena a nice note telling her how much she meant to you," he said. Was that...disapproval? Clearly, Bonnie was speaking the language of Damon at the same level that she could still remember her eighth-grade Spanish. "And be a dear, let her know what kind of flowers you want at your funeral."

Bonnie scowled; Damon smiled when he saw that she had started tapping her fingers the tiniest bit faster. "My grandmother died so that the tomb would be closed again," she said. "If those vampires are out hurting and killing people, then her death didn't mean anything. That's not acceptable to me."

Damon was still rocking back and forth and looking at her, head tilted to one side. Bonnie hated to think that she was amusing him somehow, but she had a feeling that there was a message on his face that she would be unable to read until she had reached fluency levels. No, thank you. "And you think I can...what?" he asked. "Stake them for you? You put Stefan down pretty well at a distance last week."

Bonnie could have easily killed Stefan then rather than merely stopping him, or Damon right this moment as he stood in front of her, but that wasn't the point and they both knew it. "I'm not worried about what I'll do when I find them," she said. "It's the finding them. You know what they look like. I don't. You know where vampires would go if they wanted mostly to get the hell away from here. I don't." Now it was Bonnie's turn to lean into Damon's personal space. In spite of the near-foot of height that he had on her, Damon was the one who moved away. "And I thought that maybe, just maybe you might want to make up for some of your part in it." Damon started outright grinning at her. Well, it had been a shot in the dark. "Fair enough. I thought that maybe you might like to kill something."

"It _has_ been a long time," Damon said in a musing tone that Bonnie didn't like at all. Even knowing full well that she was being baited, she sent another warning pulse through his brain. "What, you come back with a brand new battery and suddenly think that you're town sheriff?"

"If I have to be," Bonnie told Damon darkly, and meant every word of it. There hadn't been any mysterious animal attacks in months, either, but that didn't mean that she was putting it past him to start them up again because he didn't like the way that the sun was shining that day.

Damon tipped an imaginary cowboy hat at her and stepped back. "You have fun with that," he said. "In the meantime, I have better things to do with my afterlife than risking my ass chasing down vampires who were old and powerful when I was turned." He winced as he started past her car and saw that she already had her bags in the backseat. "Should have known better than to get cocky like that, kitten. If you're still in the mood to die, there's one vampire who was in the tomb and one vampire who played a role every bit as big as mine about ten miles that way." He pointed vaguely in the direction where town limits and deep woods met. "But be sure to write that note first."

Elena had talked about Damon, pre-tomb, more like she would an annoying sibling than a murderous animal. She had seemed sincere enough about it to make Bonnie wonder if maybe their wasn't a flicker in their somewhere that her basic primer wasn't advanced enough to translate. It was probably a good thing that she and Elena were standing on shaky footing and not talking much right now, because no one liked to hear "I told you so."

Bonnie waited for Damon to get several paces away before she brought out the big gun, because she barely knew Damon and still knew that he was like as not to zag right off the edge of a cliff (grabbing everyone within reach to come with him on the way down) as zig in the direction that she wanted. "They hurt your brother," she said. Damon wheeled around and was back in her face so fast that Bonnie wondered for a moment if she hadn't jarred him badly enough to make him throw a little vampire speed into the mix. She lifted her chin and stared him down, thinking that there was no way those eyes of his could have looked innocent at any point past the age of six. They just weren't made for it. "So I thought that maybe you would want to get a little back."

"You..." Damon lifted his finger at her for a moment and then dropped it back by his side. He was smiling, but Bonnie didn't think that she ought to be taking that for anything. "Might just be stepping into something too big for you to handle."

"My risk. Not yours," Bonnie said. She raised her eyebrow and waited for his answer.

"Give me two hours." Damon turned and started to walk away. "And tell Elena to stop giving out my phone number."

Bonnie didn't bother telling Damon that she and Elena were strained to the point where declarative sentences about last night's television were hard. "It's called 'Google'," she told Damon's retreating back. She settled back against her car again and let out a breath that she hadn't realized that she had been holding, only then noticing that Caroline and Matt were standing quietly under The Grill's awning and in a perfect position to have seen everything that had just transpired even if they were not quite close enough to hear. Bonnie rolled her eyes up towards the sky as Caroline raised herself up to whisper in Matt's ear. He nodded and moseyed a further distance away. Elena had said over and over again during the last summer that she was going to build a pillow fort in her room and refuse to come out again until college if one more person had told her how sorry they were for her loss. Bonnie had thought that she was being overly dramatic until now.

"Okay, so everyone has to have their one, and then if they're lucky he's like a vaccination and you don't get the actual disease that turns you into Paris Hilton or whatever," Caroline said by way of greeting. Bonnie blinked at her several times and tried to figure out what the hell Caroline was talking about, and this one was a language in which she was actually fluent. "But, speaking from really icky experience here, you don't want Damon to be your one. Pick a better bad boy."

"But the only other one we have in town is Tyler," Bonnie offered up, smiling faintly.

"So outsource." Caroline leaned up against the car and nudged at Bonnie with her elbow. "I'm just saying, let my horrible strife and bad personal decisions stand as a lesson."

Bonnie opened her mouth and for more than a second seriously considered letting it all spill out, only to finish with, "Your horrible personal decisions were seriously not that horrible, Caroline, don't worry. And it's not what it looks like."

"Okay, good," Caroline said with a visible relief that lasted only long enough for her to glance into the backseat of the Prius and see the bags thrown there. "Because it what it looks like is that you're going to elope to Atlantic City or something. Seriously, Bonnie. _We have better bad boys._ "

" _No_ ," Bonnie said with great conviction. "Not even close. It's just, um. It's something that Grams left unfinished that I really, really need to close up for her, okay?" She couldn't stop the strain from showing in her voice any more than Caroline could the immediate sympathy from her face, and Bonnie felt like the worst friend in the world even though she was telling the absolute gospel truth. "And I need Damon to help me with it. I wish that I could tell you more."

Caroline shot Matt an alarmed glance that made him automatically start coming towards them until Bonnie waved at him to stay where he was. "Am I going to see you on _Cops_?" she asked.

"You're not going to see me on anything." Bonnie reached out and took both of Caroline's hands in her own when the other girl still looked dubious. "Look. I wish I could tell you more, but I can't, and I need you to stay completely quiet on this one, okay?" Caroline looked even more dubious. "Okay, fine, but at least give me three hours. Can you do that?" Three hours wasn't much, but since Bonnie herself didn't know where they were going, yet, it might just be enough.

Caroline chewed at the edge of her thumbnail before leaning over and hugging Bonnie hard. "Promise me that you'll be careful, all right?"

Bonnie hugged her back. "Super-duper careful," she promised. "Trust me. I have this all under control."

*  
Three hours and five minutes later, Bonnie very carefully turned off her phone and tossed it into the backseat. Damon in the passenger seat arched an eyebrow at her; he was already more than slightly sulky over not being the one driving, and Bonnie wasn't in the mood for it. They were heading south. Perhaps in retaliation for the fact that not only was he not driving, but he was also not driving in Bonnie's Prius and not his car, he wasn't divulging yet why they were heading south.

"I told Caroline to give me three hours before she told anyone that I was leaving," Bonnie said.

Damon snorted softly. "You might have been pushing her past her limits by giving her one," he said. He reached out to fiddle with her radio and Bonnie, recognizing this as further retaliation for the fact that she was behind the wheel, did not give him the satisfaction of slapping his hand away. If he thought that she was going to be driven to the brink by the very best of seventies disco, then he had already severely underestimated her.

"For you, maybe," Bonnie answered. "For me, no. I'm her best friend." She sensed rather than saw Damon rolling his eyes. "I'll pick up a pre-paid later, there is no way that my dad isn't going to call the cops."

"You _have_ been reading spy novels."

"Please. I've seen _The Bourne Identity_." Bonnie stared straight ahead through the windshield, flexed her fingers against the steering wheel, and said, "I think that we need to set a few rules if we're going to work together."

Damon straightened in his seat and was suddenly staring at her very hard, so that it was impossible _not_ to feel. "And what would those be?" he asked her in a silky voice. Zig when you wanted him to zag, and grab you around the waist to take you right over the edge of the cliff with him. Bonnie focused on why she was doing this, and what she had learned while she had been away, and refused to let him make her the same girl who had bolted from him on Halloween.

"I know that you have to feed," Bonnie started. That that was the biggest obstacle to this whole crazy...thing that she had cooked up maybe should have told her that she was in no mental place to be doing it at all, but there was important and then there was _Important._ Grams warranted the capital letter.

"If you are about to suggest that I go vegan for the duration, then I highly suggest that you turn the car around now." She didn't have to look at him to know that he was doing that nowhere-near-his-eyes smile. "And I can tell you about some people I've known who deserved to be taken off of this planet far, far more than your average bunny."

"I know that you're not going to give up human blood just because you like to kill things," Bonnie continued stubbornly forward. "But while we're doing this, you don't kill any humans for food, and you don't compel them, either." She pulled her foot off the gas and let it hover over the brake, sure by the slit-eyed way that Damon was looking at her that this whole thing was going to die a premature death and leave her to stalk forward alone.

"You have a very high opinion of my opinion of violence if you think that you're going to be the one setting all the rules," Damon finally said, which was not a 'no', not yet. Bonnie glanced over at him, genuinely surprised, and then nearly swerved off the road when they passed a cop car hiding beneath a billboard for the World's Greatest Fried Chicken, fifteen miles ahead. She held her breath, but apparently Caroline was being beyond true to her word.

"Fine," she said when they were sufficiently past the cop for her to take a full breath again, to Damon's obvious amusement. "What are your terms?"

"So formal," Damon mused before he made a face and finally flipped the radio station over to one playing the Beatles. Bonnie was made perversely proud by having been able to outlast him on that one. "Firstly, it's going to make this whole arrangement just a _little_ bit awkward if you insist on referring to my species as things."

"It's that or 'murderer'," Bonnie said tightly. Stefan was, well, his brother, and Damon had apparently managed to work some kind of special charm on Elena, but if he had it holstered somewhere he wasn't showing it.

"Call me whatever you want, little witch, but _I_ make my choices, not some mindless instinct." Damon started drumming his fingers against his thigh as the Beatles ended and Mick Jagger came on and let them know that he wanted to introduce himself as a man of wealth and taste. "Secondly, if I agree to play by your rules and don't kill or compel anyone, _you_ have to promise not to go all--" He made a fluttering motion by the side of his head that Bonnie meant to take the pain that she had sent through Stefan's brain at the pageant. "On me if I convince some sweet young thing to donate me a pint or two completely on her own." Bonnie took her eyes off the road long enough to stare at him in amazement. "You wanted my expertise, and I'm telling you that my expertise might take us into areas where there's not a convenient hospital with lax security nearby every time that I start feeling peckish."

"I was thinking more about someone actually giving their blood to you willingly," Bonnie said as she turned back before she crashed and killed--well, at least one of them.

"Oh, it's not that hard, when you get right down to it. Humans will do almost as much for lust as they will for love." Damon held his hand to her. "Do we have a deal, or don't we?"

As much as the idea made her queasy, Bonnie didn't see that she could rightly object to anything that someone wanted to do when it wasn't going to do them or others permanent harm, not if they were the ones to actually choose it. She took Damon's hand in her own and was surprised to find him only slightly cooler to the touch than human flesh. It had been hard to get a good gauge when he had been trying to rip out her throat out a few months previously.

"Deal," Bonnie said.

Damon slid further down in his seat and braced his knee up against the dashboard. "In that case, since you insist upon playing chauffeur, we need to head for South Carolina," he said. "The first vampire that you're looking for is named Thomas, he was turned down there when it was still just a colony."

"You're certain that's where he would have gone?" Bonnie asked.

Damon smiled, but it wasn't entirely pleasant and was, to her eyes, more for himself than for her. "Live a couple of centuries," he told her, "and your routines might get bigger, but they're still your routines. Everyone heads for home again sooner or later."

Bonnie decided not to mention the stillness that had taken over Damon's face when he had said that any more than she was going to bring up again that it had taken a reference to Stefan to get Damon on this ride, in deference to that cliff that she was still certain that Damon would leap over for not better reason than to be contrary. "South Carolina it is," she said.

As he made himself comfortable over in his seat and the Stones started asking Bonnie if she could guess their name, Damon remarked idly, "And who knows? Before we finish this and turn for home again, you might just be the one who offers me that pint. Completely willingly, per your terms."

Bonnie gave Damon the biggest and brightest smile that she could conjure. "Oh, Damon, I wouldn't worry about that," she informed him sweetly. "So far as I'm concerned, you're really just a useful tool."

Damon chuckled before he could hide it, and on the radio Jagger finally finished trying to wring out some sympathy so that Springsteen could take over and start telling her about the streets of Philadelphia.

End Part One


	2. Chapter 2

Part Two

Bonnie was certain that they were going to have to pull over at a convenience store so that she could pick up a map, but Damon directed her to Prosperity, South Carolina with a nearly bored indifference, more than once not even bothering to open his eyes as he told her which exit to take and where it was faster to drive through the small towns rather than handling the highways. The latter was, Bonnie highly suspected, more of an effort to keep them away from the possible stares of cops on the lookout for a blue Prius carrying both a teenage girl and a man much too old for her.

 _Much, **much** too old for her,_ Bonnie thought as Damon shifted for the first time in nearly an hour, right as they were passing a sign letting them know that they were only twenty-five miles from their destination. This time they were promised catfish rather than chicken, though Bonnie was hoping that grease would still be involved in one form or another. She had remembered to bring Emily's book of spells along with her, but had neglected the fact that a package of Oreos and some bottled water would have been a good plan, too.

"How do you know where we're going so easily?" Bonnie asked as Damon took his knee down from the dash. She doubted that he had really been sleeping; she wasn't sure that he even did. "You can't tell me that the roads have stayed the same for the past one-hundred and fifty years."

"No, but I've had a lot of time to wander, and remembering routes is easy for me," Damon said. He looked out the window as they passed a giant maple tree in someone's front yard that might have been able to rival even him for age. "You always want to remember good hunting grounds." Bonnie made a disgusted sound from the back of her throat and leaned forward to turn the radio up.

*  
Prosperity was a small town with white clapboard buildings dominating most of its center and Main Street, fading into residential homes and then ultimately mobile parks as it radiated outwards. Bonnie lifted her eyebrow and counted the number of pickup trucks that they passed from the time that they crossed the city limits until they reached a motel. It was a high number. She ignored Damon's smirk as they very pointedly took separate rooms and then walked out into the late sunset, just giving way into true twilight. It made the white buildings look dingy and gray, and turned Damon's eyes icy-sharp when he touched at her arm.

"We both need to eat," he said to her, bending low to speak against her ear even though the light traffic going down the road wasn't nearly loud enough to warrant it. Bonnie would have denied it, but her stomach growled at precisely the wrong moment. Damon's smirk grew even deeper; Bonnie wanted to tell him that he was going to stick like that if he wasn't careful, if she wasn't fairly certain that he would have taken it as a compliment.

"It was that obvious?" Bonnie asked. She put her hand against Damon's chest and pushed him back.

He took the hint with grace and gave the one of them who actually needed to breathe some breathing room. "I could probably tell you that your leg was going to cramp up before you knew," he said. "We passed a diner a few blocks back."

Home of the catfish. Bonnie rocked back onto her heels and viewed Damon through narrowed eyes. "And you?" she asked.

Damon looked pointedly over his shoulder. Bonnie dimly remembered that they had passed a small hospital on the way in, and also several bars. Damon's smile only deepened when he turned back and saw her expression. "This plan of yours is really not going to go far unless you learn to trust me," he said.

"I'm not related to you," Bonnie said. "I don't have to trust you."

Damon put his hands lightly to either side of Bonnie's face and leaned in. "I keep my word," he told her before turning and walking away without saying anything else.

"Guess I'm going to have to take that as an answer," Bonnie muttered under her breath. She stopped by an electronics store on her way to the diner, picked up an anonymous cellular phone, and then sat in her booth until her food had gone cold staring at it without turning it on. Elena would keep her secret, if Bonnie asked her to. She was also the only person who could actually know the whole truth about what Bonnie was doing other than the person riding shotgun with her.

In the end, Bonnie pushed the phone into her jacket pocket, quickly ate the remainder of the dinner that she no longer particularly wanted, and threw down money for the check. She had barely gone two steps back onto the sidewalk before running into Damon, almost literally. It was full dark by now, and the brightest light on the sidewalk came from the sparse street lamps and the intermittent flash of headlights going past. There were moths large enough to be mistaken for bats fluttering about the lamps, and Bonnie couldn't help but think that was a pretty fitting halo for any of the Salvatores, considering.

"Unfortunate phone call?" Damon asked, searching Bonnie's face.

"Anything but." Bonnie shook her head and pushed her bangs out of her eyes. "So. Thomas. You're sure that he would have come back here?"

"It's what I would have done," Damon said with an easy shrug. His face was flushed with new blood; since it was too early in the evening for him to have picked someone sufficiently drunk up at any of the bars, Bonnie was going to have to take it on faith that he had visited the hospital. It would lose a certain weight if she kept threatening to explode Damon's head and didn't actually do it, anyway, and she still needed him. "Home again, home again, blah-blah-blah."

"Fine." Bonnie brushed her hair back from her forehead again, shoved her hands into her pockets when she realized that Damon was making extensive note of every nervous twitch. "Since you're going all _Mindhunter_ on this guy, what does a newly-returned vampire do once he's finally found his way home again?"

Damon jerked his chin in the direction of one of the bars of which Prosperity seemed to have no shortage, one to which Bonnie's eye looked to be older than any of the others. When the door opened to let a patron exit, a snatch of country music drifted to them both. "He hunts," Damon said simply. "Unless you have a fake ID tucked into the pages of your spell book--"

"I'll wait outside," Bonnie said. She grabbed for Damon's arm. "Hey. Are you sure that you'll be able to recognize him right away?"

Damon's smile wasn't pretty, but he removed her hand from his arm with an odd kind of courtesy, almost as if he were on the verge of kissing the backs of her fingers. "He helped tie my brother to a ceiling and watched as vervain was poured into his eyes," he said, silky-smooth and making Bonnie aware of just how much she was standing next to a very dangerous creature on a very slender tether. "Yeah, witch. I think I'll remember his face."

Feeling more shaken and like her pre-Grams and pre-tutelage self than she cared to admit, Bonnie took a step back. "Bring him out to the alley, okay?" she instructed him. "I want to be a part of this, too."

"Bloodlust," Damon remarked, though his eyes were already fixed onto the bar. "I never would have guessed it of you." The way that he said it made it sound like a compliment; not certain that he was a party from which she particularly wanted to be receiving compliments, Bonnie shivered very slightly.

"Would you have guessed the things that you would be capable of, before you turned?" she asked Damon as the two of them crossed the street together. He put his hand against the small of her back until she was on the pavement again. As fixed and focused as his gaze still was on the bar, Bonnie wasn't even certain that he realized what he was doing. She could almost picture him in a suit and cravat, making certain that her hoop skirt didn't drag through the mud, and almost forgot that during his hey-day she would have been the one washing the hoop skirts, not wearing them.

Damon pulled his eyes away from the bar just long enough to look into hers. "Oh, yes," he said as lightly as if they were discussing the weather. "By the time that Katherine turned me, I was already very aware of what I was capable of."

No, she was not going to forget how slender a tether she actually had on Damon, neither soon nor ever. Bonnie grabbed Damon by the arm again hard enough to get his attention and refused to let go when he threw her a look that was pure ice. "Bring Thomas out to the alley when you find him," she said. Damon's mouth started to turn up into that strange half-smile he had that could mean everything and nothing at all. "I mean it, Damon. You said that you keep your word."

"And I do." Damon shook her off. "But I never promised how big a slice you were going to get in taking them down, so you're just going to have to trust me." He stepped into the bar and left Bonnie making frustrated noises out on the pavement. It didn't take more than a glance over the establishment to know that this wasn't The Grill, where toddlers could play under the pool tables just so long as they didn't venture too close to the bar. The patrons entering and exiting looked her over as if they could spy at twenty feet what she really was, a teenaged runaway in way over her head, too; she wouldn't get any further than the door if she tried it.

Muttering things under her breath that would have gotten her in trouble if her father had been present, and then in a lot more trouble if she had ever told him that she learned that kind of language from Grams in the first place, Bonnie wrapped her arms around herself and stalked towards the alley behind the bar. She was nearly glad that she had lost her appetite midway through dinner; whatever kind of bar food that they were serving inside, it suffered greatly after marinating in the dumpster for awhile and joining with the smells of alcohol, urine, and just a tinge of vomit.

"You were never promised glamor," Bonnie muttered to herself as she paced back and forth. There was technically a stoop connected to the back door, but it looked as if more than one of the customers inside had barely made it out of the bar before they felt an overwhelming urge to relieve themselves of everything that they had drunk inside of it. Bonnie thought that she would pass. She continued pacing back and forth, touching every now and again at the new phone in her pocket, and asked herself how long it could really be taking Damon to figure out whether or not Thomas was hunting that night so that they could either deal with him or move on. That he hadn't walked right back out again immediately, that had to mean something, right? Or maybe it just meant that the bar served a far better scotch than one would have guessed from the facade.

A drunk couple staggered out the back door, hurling the metal open so hard that Bonnie had to leap back or else risk a black eye. They were entwined around one another so deeply that she looked away quickly out of respect, not expecting to be noticed at all. She nearly startled when the man lifted his head away from the neck that the woman was so generously offering him-- _no marks there except for the normal passion-wounds made by blunt human teeth, Bonnie knew how to look for these things by now_ \--and slurred at her, "You okay out here, little girl?"

Bonnie's eyebrows went up before she could stop them. "I'm fine," she said. "I'm just watching for my dat--my dad. Waiting for my dad." If there anything approaching a God in the universe, then Bonnie dearly hoped that he, she, or any of the pit stops in between would not force her to pretend that she and Damon were romantically involved.

The woman of the pair immediately looked sympathetic, slightly unnerving given that her eyeliner had smeared and most of her lipstick was on her date's face. "Aww, sweetie," she said, while the man was clearly doing a mental scan of everyone in the bar to see who could have had a teenaged daughter. "Do you need us to give you a ride anywhere?"

Bonnie took stock of the man and then the woman in turn, both of whom were clearly in no condition to be driving themselves anywhere, let alone anyone else. "I'm fine," she repeated. "Really, he'll be out in just a minute, and then I'll drive him home." The sounds of a commotion started within the bar. Bonnie smiled tightly and would have willed the couple straight out of the alley and to their eventual horizontal destination if she could have. "Oh, look, that's probably him now."

The back door flew open for the second time in five minutes, admitting Damon and a cursing, clawing man who was dressed in flannel and denim, yet Bonnie could still imagine him in a pair of mutton-chop sideburns without any strain whatsoever. They were both wearing veins spreading out around their eyes like lace masks, and their eyes were blacker than death. Damon hurled Thomas against the far wall, knocking over a garbage pail and two squalling alley cats in the process, and made a sound that could never be mistaken for human when Thomas scrambled back up to his feet and hurled himself at Damon as if he hadn't felt the fall at all. Bonnie held her breath and hoped that her well-meaning drunk couple was deeply and truly plowed, because there was going to be no mistaking that something was going on here far, far beyond the ordinary brawls of redneck bars.

"That's your _dad_?" the man demanded of Bonnie, shocked.

Even though Thomas wore a face old enough to be Bonnie's father, it was Damon who whipped his head around with a grin and replied, "Oh, she calls me 'Daddy' all the time, don't worry about it." Bonnie got her satisfaction when Thomas got the better of him and hurled Damon into the reeking dumpster with a force that would have cracked a human's skull.

"We should call the cops," the woman said, and the man began nodding vigorous agreement as they both started backing off towards the street.

"No, it's okay!" Bonnie called, her voice getting just a touch shrill. "Look, he's getting up again, he's not really hurt!" As Damon picked himself up, ignoring the blood running down the side of his face as a deep cut in his scalp closed itself like it was nothing, and the couple broke and ran. "Oh, fuck."

"Witch, if you wanted to be more than decoration here, this would be a good time," Damon snarled at her. Thomas grabbed him by his hair and delivered several rib-crushing and organ-splattering punches into his abdomen.

"Fuck," Bonnie whispered again. She made a headlong rush towards Thomas without knowing what she was doing other than that she was murmuring a spell under her breath on instinct and could feel the air growing pregnant and thick, the way that it did just before the breaking of a thunderstorm, while Damon yelled something at her that sounded like a garbled version of, "Idiot." Thomas struck her a blow across her cheek and temple that felt like being hit by a sledgehammer and sent Bonnie straight off of her feet and into the far wall of the alley. The brick tore through her blouse, and then her skin, and made the bones, ligaments, and tendons tremble and consider before they decided to stay in their proper place. Thomas spit an obscenity at her and then went right back to punishing Damon, but that was fine. Bonnie hadn't been rushing in as a blind fool; she had smelled the alcohol on his breath.

" _Incendium,_ " Bonnie finished, and then yelled, "Damon, get back!" He was struggling--Bonnie thought that Thomas might have actually managed to dislocate his knee with that last kick--but he still managed to scramble back just as Bonnie took the vapors in the air and turned them into flame.

There was a lot of fluid in a given body, even a long-dead vampire body. Bonnie had to concentrate hard, and it still took long enough that the police sirens had started to wail, and as much as she wanted to turn her face away, towards the wall, she refused. _For you, Grams._ Grams would not have wanted her to flinch away from what she was doing here, for good or for ill, so Bonnie kept looking until it was done. She was breathing hard.

Damon came to her after a long, shocked silence. He was limping until he reached down and adjusted his knee with a sound that Bonnie wished she hadn't heard. "You didn't think to bring stakes?" he asked her.

" _You_ didn't think to bring stakes?" Bonnie fired back. She only then realized that her shoulder was bleeding, and kind of a lot. "Oh, damn." She tried to smother the flow with her fingers and found them covered in a warm, red mess within seconds. "We can clean it up, tie it off--"

"No, we can't," Damon said. "You need stitches." He leaned his hand down to her in order to help her to her feet, carefully looking away as if she was nude before him rather than merely battered. Bonnie started to refuse, until she realized that her head was wobbly and her shoulder hurt so much that the pain was affecting her balance. She put her hand into Damon's even though it was sticky with blood so that he could pull her to her feet.

"Are _you_ going to be okay?" Bonnie asked as Damon held his fingers very close to his lips.

He dropped his hand without any particularly hurriedness. "I drank enough inside," he said. Since he smelled like alcohol, too, Bonnie didn't ask _of what_ , decided she wasn't certain that she wanted to know.

*  
A southern town with that many bars, Bonnie knew that there had to be an after-hours clinic somewhere for those special moments that weren't quite bad enough for the ER, and she was not wrong. She and Damon walked in to see an empty lobby and a no-nonsense woman sitting behind the counter, muttering softly to herself as she filled out paperwork. When she looked up, her expression didn't have to shift for Bonnie to know exactly what she saw: a young girl with a bleeding shoulder and a bruised face being flanked by a man too old for her and drenched in bad boy sauce who might know how to _not_ loom over somebody if his life really, really depended on it, but since it didn't right now he wasn't going to bother.

"Um, hi," Bonnie said, approaching the counter. She didn't bother hissing under her breath for Damon to at least _try_ not to be creepy, since she was a runaway and they weren't so far from Mystic Falls that an alert couldn't have gone out. "I fell."

"Hmm." The woman looked back and forth between Bonnie and Damon and said, "You'll need to fill out these forms and show ID."

"Oh, um. I don't have any?" The woman behind the counter started to look even more dubious. "My boyfriend and I were going to a concert, and I tripped over a curb--"

"She's a complete klutz, but you can't pick the ones you love," Damon interrupted.

"And hit my head on the car," Bonnie went on, steadfastly ignoring Damon. "And then cut myself when I hit the ground. Point is, I have cash to pay, but I didn't want to take my purse in with me, because it's kinda not a good club, and my grandmother is going to be so pissed at me as it is when I have to explain to her in the morning, I do _not_ want to call and wake her up now--"

"She doesn't approve of me," Damon interrupted again. Bonnie barely resisted the urge to stomp on his insole, even though that probably would have helped convince the receptionist that Damon hadn't abused her.

"Imagine that," the receptionist said. She sighed, seemed to come to some kind of internal resolution, and pushed the clipboard across the counter. "All right, the doctor on duty will be able to see you just as soon as you fill these out. She'll want to see you alone." A delicate stress laid onto the last syllable, and her eyes were only for Damon. He smiled sweetly.

"Babe, let me get this for you, your hands are all bloody," he said, smoothly taking both the clipboard and pen before Bonnie could touch it. They went to the double row of blue plastic chairs broken up only by a few, forlorn copies of _Cosmopolitan_ and, even sadder to Bonnie's eyes, _Highlights._ "I could have just compelled her," Damon muttered to her. "Now we only have a coin-flip chance that she's not going to call the cops as soon as you go back there."

"No compulsion," Bonnie hissed back just as fiercely. "Not for any reason. Put down 'Emily Forbes' as my name."

"Oh, very original," Damon said as he moved to do as she had directed and then went on, "I'm not going to circle back and eat her, it would be harmless."

" _Not for any reason._ That kind of thing is never harmless." The door to the clinic swung open again and let in another couple. The woman of this pair had a black eye, one entire half of her face already starting to go swollen and bruised, and blood drying on the corner of her mouth. Bonnie wondered if she was going to try to tell the receptionist that she had fallen into a car door, too. "She's looking out for stuff like _that_ , okay?" She sighed when Damon looked over the couple with a blatant lack of interest and then went back to filling out the forms.

"I'm making you eighteen," Damon announced without making any particular effort to keep his voice down. Bonnie barely restrained the urge to drop her head into her hands. She kept an eye on the couple in the corner after Damon had run the clipboard back up to the counter. The woman's head was slightly bowed, and the man was whispering into her ear as she nodded. Since her face looked bad, but not bad enough to require medical attention, Bonnie wasn't sure why they had come in at all until she saw the way that the woman was cradling her left side, as if maybe some of the ribs were broken. Bonnie stared hard at them without bothering to hide her attention until she nearly missed her assumed name being called.

The doctor on call was a tall woman with close-cropped hair who wasn't wearing glasses, but nonetheless still gave the impression that she was looking at Bonnie over the top of a pair as Bonnie took a seat on the exam room table and pushed up the sleeve of her blouse. There was blood running nearly down to her elbow, but little to none of it appeared to to fresh.

"Car door, huh?" the doctor asked her as she began cleaning the blood from Bonnie's arm.

"And the ground," Bonnie said. "There was gravel. We were seeing a band."

"Hmm." The doctor finished cleaning the blood and grit from Bonnie's arm, applied a cream that made all of the skin it touched start to go first tingly and then numb, then switched gloves so that she could shine a light into each of Bonnie's eyes. Bonnie didn't think that Thomas had struck her hard enough to cause actual trauma, but she still sat very still until the doctor had finished to her satisfaction and prepared a needle and thread to tend to Bonnie's arm. "What was the name of the band?"

"The Undead," Bonnie answered without hesitation, having known that such a question was probably going to be coming. "Can't get enough of that thrash metal." The doctor stopped in mid-stitch to look at her. "Look, I know what you're thinking, but Damon didn't do this to me."

"Hmm," the doctor said again. It seemed to be her very favorite word. "If I issue you a prescription in the name you gave, are you going to be able to pick it up?" Bonnie looked at her without speaking. "Fair enough. You got lucky, just five stitches, but you're fooling yourself if you think I believe the whole tripped into a car story. It looks like someone knocked you into a wall."

Bonnie smiled tightly as the doctor finished tying off the stitches. "Damon didn't do this to me," she repeated. "And, yes, the man waiting for me out there is named 'Damon', I'm not pulling any tricks there." She still didn't breathe easily again until she was paying in the waiting room and cops weren't ringed out front to bring her in. Damon put his hand in the small of her back again as he led them out the door, but he was leaning further away from her than he had been before.

"What is it?" Bonnie asked.

"You still smell like blood," Damon replied tautly. "It's distracting."

"Oh." Bonnie looked down at her blouse, the sleeve of which was splattered and obviously ruined, but the skin beneath which was entirely cleaned up. So it was a doubly good thing that she had gotten them separate rooms for the night, then.

There was a battered Ford sitting outside the clinic that Bonnie was willing to bet if anything belonged to the couple inside. She stood still for a long, long moment, wondering if a sudden engine fire would be worth it, until Damon said, "You've already made yourself memorable, how wide a trail do you actually want to leave?"

"Your hearing's good enough to hear what they were saying in there," Bonnie answered. "Did he hit her?"

Damon answered by saying, "You can be the hero, or you can kill some vampires. Take your pick."

Bonnie swore under her breath inventively enough to make Damon's eyebrow lift, still torn, but in the end she turned back towards the motel.

End Part Two


	3. Chapter 3

Part Three

Bonnie woke up in her motel room with a headache, and could not stop herself from blurting out, " _Nice_ ," as she took a peek at the side of her face in the bathroom mirror. The swelling wasn't that bad, at least, and concealer could cover the bruise. Beyond that, Bonnie resigned herself to wearing sunglasses for the next few days and getting a few looks from people who didn't understand that as far as brute force was concerned, she and Damon were pretty much on equal footing. She smeared antibiotic ointment over her stitches per the doctor's orders, applied a fresh bandage, and then stepped out onto the sidewalk that ran in front of the rooms. She was expecting to have to pound on Damon's door to get him up, as late as they had gotten in and with him being, well, what he was. What she was not expecting to find was Damon already leaning up against the driver's door of her car. "Not expecting" became "and not pleased, either" when she saw that he was twirling her key ring idly around his finger.

"Did you come into my room last night?" Bonnie demanded. She paused. " _Could_ you have come into my room last night?" The idea of Damon being able to creep up on her without knowing that he was there threw the whole enterprise into an entirely different light, even if he did say that he was a man of his word.

Damon regarded the door to her room for a long moment. "Probably," he said finally. "Hotels and motels are gray areas, but since you were only planning on staying for one night..." He shrugged and then smiled when he saw her face. "Relax. I didn't go looming over you in the middle of the night like Bela Lugosi. I took your keys from your pocket before you went inside."

"A pick-pocket. That's a twist." Bonnie held out her hand for Damon to give her the keys. Instead, he gave her a bottle of orange juice and a small bottle of aspirin before he opened the driver's door to get inside. "Oh, hell no."

"Compelling people all the time gets boring, and I've had a long time to learn how to keep myself entertained." Bonnie sent a warning flare at Damon, and he shook his finger at her. "Ah-ah-ah, I've held to both the letter _and_ the spirit of my agreement. You hold to yours."

Bonnie stubbornly stayed on the sidewalk, hands on her hips, and ignored the fact that the bottle was condensing over and that she was very, very thirsty and had Satan's baby of a headache. "I didn't think that I really needed to point out that stealing my car was going to be a no-no," she said.

"Don't ever do any spellwork that involves summoning, then, you'll get eaten alive for leaving holes like that open." Damon folded his arms over the top of the car door and looked her up and down, face suddenly serious. "Thomas might have spilled a few secrets to me once he knew I was another vampire and before he realized _which_ vampire," he said. Bonnie knew that she must have looked dubious, because Damon added, "And that's where overindulging gets you. He was fat as a tick and not paying attention. Point being, there's a second tomb vampire settled in about three hours further south, and he thinks that the rest are hunkering in Miami."

"Miami?" Bonnie tilted her head to one side. "Um, isn't that a little bright? How many vampires have jewelry like you and Stefan?"

"Not that many, or else you humans would be in a lot more trouble. Miami's a tourist city, and its boom season is only a few weeks away. That means a lot of people, a lot of alcohol, and not many reasons to think much of it when the person you were talking to the night before doesn't show up again the next day. It's a good hunting ground. Besides." Damon twirled the keys around his finger again and still did not give them back to her. "When those vampires went into the tomb, Florida was still mostly a godforsaken swamp with a lot of plantations, a whole lot of pissed-off Seminoles who were not taking the idea of relocation well, and a good chance of winning the malaria lottery. Cars, corn syrup, and sexting they can all adapt to, but the idea that anyone would go down to Florida for actual fun is something that they have to see to believe."

The sun wasn't making her head feel any better, her sunglasses were in the glove compartment, and the less time that they spent standing there arguing about the driving arrangements was more time that they could spend not being caught with their rears hanging out like the night before once they did get to this second vampire. Bonnie huffed and stomped around to the passenger door while Damon smiled sweetly at her and slid behind the wheel. She recovered her sunglasses and slid them onto her face before she used the orange juice to swallow a palmful of aspirin.

"Just for the record," she told Damon, "you touch anything of mine again without permission, we're going to have a problem. And thank you for the orange juice." She didn't have to look Damon's way to know that he was doing that half-smile thing; he practically made the air move with it.

"I like you when you're cranky," Damon said. "It makes you more fun." Bonnie turned her head just far enough so that she could give Damon a dubious look through her hair. "When you're a very special, very particular kind of cranky that doesn't end in you impaling me on trees or making my brain explode."

And thus, he attempted to bribe her with juice. "I never tried to make _your_ brain explode," Bonnie pointed out.

"Fond memories of your grandmother, then." Bonnie scowled at him and turned her face towards the window, but not before she reached forward and flipped through radio stations until she found a disco channel. Damon made a disgusted noise at her. "A _very_ particular kind of cranky," he repeated.

*  
Damon took great pleasure in leaning up against the counter, not quite touching her but implying a hell of a lot, as Bonnie pointedly ordered them two rooms again in Hardeeville. It was still early, scarcely noon, but they weren't going to be able to hunt until night fell. Bonnie shifted her shoulders around to feel the residual ache and wondered if Damon would even have been able to stand if he hadn't had a vampire's healing abilities and a way-too-familiar touch in putting a dislocated knee back together. They needed to plan, get their shit together.

"You can come in," Bonnie called over her shoulder to Damon as she entered the room assigned to her and threw her bag down on her bed.

"Could have, anyway," Damon said as he went directly to the cheap, cigarette-pocked dresser and began running his hands over the top, the drawers. Bonnie took a seat on the end of the bed and watched him from behind; his face was different when he wasn't trying to put on a show. Not softer, not harder, not even more or less human, just...different.

"I was being polite," Bonnie said. Damon turned and smiled at her. "Have you called anyone from home to let them know where you are?"

"Have you?" Damon raised his eyes to look at her through the mirror, making Bonnie wonder if he hadn't been aware of her gaze the entire time and putting on a show even then. "Did you give them your real name when you checked in?"

"Of course not." She tallied the chances that the doctor from Prosperity was going to do any digging on Emily Forbes after she had walked away and actually manage to trace her all the way down to a cash-only motel three hours to the south and wasn't terribly impressed by them.

"Good." Damon rattled the dresser back and forth a little bit, smacking his palm back against the wall when the next room over pounded on the plaster in irritation. "I would really hate for you to get in trouble for this." He made a fist and drove it straight down through the top of the dresser, throwing splinters everywhere and making Bonnie yelp reflexively. The person on the other side of the wall was quiet; Bonnie really hoped that it was not because he was running for the manager to deal with the crazy people housed next door. Damon pried up several pieces of the dresser and tossed them to Bonnie.

"Nice," she said, laying them to the side.

"Can't afford to be checking into any more after-hours clinics to patch you up again," Damon said over his shoulder. "Maybe that doc last night was fooled, but someone's going to check a missing person's report sooner or later." He looked at her through the mirror again. "So if you can't control your powers--"

Bonnie focused and wrenched up several pieces from the dresser herself and got a certain satisfaction as Damon was the one who moved back quickly. His mirror-self had dark eyes and spidery lines etched over his skin, just for a moment. "I can handle my powers," Bonnie said. "Though, speaking of attracting too much attention--" She didn't remember that he had slipped off to feed again after being hurt, and it hadn't been long from the time that they had made it back to the motel to being on the road again; did vampires even need to sleep? Bonnie threw the keys to her car at the back of Damon's head, and he twisted easily to snatch them out of the air.

"Eat," Bonnie told him grudgingly. "If you need to." Damon jingled her keys in his hand and gave her that head-tilt look again. "One or both of us is going to get hurt tonight if we're not at full strength, and even if you _can_ heal yourself really quickly--" Bonnie finally made a huffing noise. "Look, just go eat, okay?"

"Wow, I must have made it out of the 'thing' category." Damon dug into the back pocket of his jeans, produced a small object of his own, and tossed it to Bonnie. She caught it between her hands and discovered that it was a pocket-knife, obviously very old. The handle was made of some kind of antler or bone and was worn even smoother than its polish in the places where fingers would fit, and the blade when she opened it up bore the marks of many sharpenings. "You didn't really think that we were going to do this without stakes, did you?" He disappeared out the door, leaving Bonnie alone in the room with the shattered dresser and a whole lot of pointed wood that was about to become pointier. Before she got started, she pulled the pre-paid phone out of her pocket and stared at it for a long moment. Bonnie ultimately put it back into her pocket without bringing herself to dial a number.

*  
When she and Damon had four stakes apiece, Bonnie took the room key and went out. It was early afternoon by then, summer heat just starting to curl in and make sweat prickle on the back of her neck. Hardeeville was smaller than Prosperity and reminded her a lot of Mystic Falls, old store fronts painted with shoe-polish to support the basketball and gymnastics teams and school colors wrapped around the light poles. Bonnie meandered down the main street in the same general direction that most of the people seemed to be going and didn't have to wander long before she found herself in a neatly groomed park, complete with shady trees and a sand-filled playground. She could smell burgers and hot dogs cooking; there were children selling cans of pop out of ice chests. Everything that would stand still long enough had been wrapped with white and red streamers, and, though it took her a bit to work her way through what appeared to be every person living within the town limits, Bonnie eventually found herself standing before a picturesque white gazebo. There were about half a dozen gurneys clustered inside, and on each one lay a person with tubing running from their arm and to a collection bag.

 _Hardeeville 22nd Annual Blood Drive and Charity Carnival_ Bonnie read off a neatly lettered sign affixed to the gazebo. She dropped her eyes a little lower, down to the hours of operation, and felt her stomach drop with them. The festivities were going to continue until eleven that night, a good two hours after sunset. The vampire in this town wouldn't need to troll a bar, they were going to have all the blood that they could drink ambling about right here in the open.

"Almost makes you think that they want to be killed, doesn't it?" Bonnie jumped and swore, placing her hand over her heart when she recognized Damon's voice. She turned to find him directly behind her, the sunlight filtering down through the leaves making his face belong to entirely different people from one moment to the next.

"What?" Damon asked when Bonnie glared at him. "You told me to eat, I came and ate. It was a lot easier to follow the smell of blood than it would have been to hope for a gullible alcoholic at two in the afternoon."

Bonnie turned back to stare bleakly at the gazebo. There was a teenaged boy a few years younger than her lying down on one of the gurneys to donate. An older man that Bonnie assumed to be his father had to fill out the paperwork for him. "What are the odds that this town's vampire is going to be happy with a few bags of stolen blood, too?" she asked. She could feel Damon's expression without needing to actually twist around and see it.

"I hate the vast majority of humanity, and I _didn't_ spend one hundred and fifty years locked up to starve and brood about it," Damon said. "Besides, what do you care? I thought that this was about revenge, not..." She didn't need to turn around to here the air quotes, either. "'Doing the right thing.'"

She shouldn't have brought out the cell phone at all, it was rattling her and making her forget why she was doing this. "Killing vampires _is_ doing the right thing," Bonnie said shortly. She dug the key to her room from her pocket and passed it over to Damon without asking herself too closely why, exactly, she was becoming so easygoing with him passing in and out of her space. "Here. You can go back if you want. I'm going to buy a burger and get the lay of the place."

Damon kept in step with her as she turned to walk away, and Bonnie wasn't surprised by that, either. "What kind of gentleman would I be if I let you wander around in a strange place by yourself?" he asked her.

"Exactly the kind of gentleman that you pretend to be." Bonnie passed over two quarters to a little boy manning one of the ice chests in exchange for a can of Coke and directions to the grill. Damon caught her by the elbow, and that was _not_ okay. Bonnie grabbed his wrist, hard, and let her skin turn warm. Damon relaxed his hold on her elbow and smiled a little when Bonnie let the threat of fire fade away but still did not release him immediately.

"I'll tell you the same thing that you told me last night," Damon leaned down to say to her without seeming to care that the little boy was now staring at them, gape-mouthed. "I'm not here as your sidekick. I have a claim to this fight, too, and I'm not going to walk away without my fair share."

"Didn't you also tell me that we didn't negotiate the portions?" Bonnie reminded him before she let go of his wrist and walked away.

*  
By nine p.m. Bonnie was tired and figured that she knew every square inch of the park as well as she knew her own bedroom. She and Damon both could have gone back to their respective rooms and caught a few more hours of sleep before the sun went down and it was go time, but by some mutual, unspoken game of chicken they had both refused and had continued circling the park throughout the afternoon, long after they had learned the outline of it. _These people have to think that we are so, so creepy_ , Bonnie caught herself thinking as she sat down for a moment on a bench with a clear view of the gazebo. She had watched her third shift of nurses moving about by now, and too many people donating to count. None of them had leaned down to rip anyone's throat out yet. Bonnie didn't guess that she had any reason to expect that finding the vampire would be that easy, but with Damon still in a snit she had certainly hoped.

Bonnie rose from the bench and watched the last edge of the sun falling below the gazebo roof. By her calculations, she had just enough time to race back to the motel and get the stakes that she had made before it turned into hunting season in earnest. She made it to the outermost fringes of the crowd before Damon was suddenly in front of her, his face taut and intent as he looked at something far off and over her head. Bonnie twisted, but could see nothing but people.

"Too late," Damon said, though Bonnie had not told him where she was going.

"Seriously?" Bonnie twisted again. "But it's not sundown yet."

"It's close enough to fudge it. Short redhead, wearing a black hoodie."

" _Shit_." Bonnie raised herself onto her toes and was slightly mollified to discover that Damon had been using an advantage of height, not super-sleuth vampire abilities or whatever. She found the girl in question within seconds, sitting on the same bench that Bonnie had vacated moments before. The tendrils of hair creeping out from under a hoodie that would have made the vampire look like a serial killer if she hadn't been so petite and been wearing a face only slightly older than Bonnie's own were the color of sun giving way at the horizon. She was angling her body away from it so that the hoodie protected her skin, and Bonnie could see a pair of sunglasses dangling loosely from one hand. The vampire was staring at the gazebo as if she were debating between eating its occupants and simply burning it down.

"That's a lot of hate," Bonnie said softly. She was very aware of the irony, when she couldn't seem to stop herself from rocking from the balls of her feet to the heels and back again. Whether Damon had picked it up or not, he was too focused on the task at hand to point it out.

"It's what makes the world go 'round," he said simply as he started forward. "Her name is Josephine."

"Josephine," Bonnie repeated to herself as she followed. She threw a speculative look up at the tree branches as she passed under them, but none of them were anywhere near low-hanging enough for her to reach up and grab one, and with street lights and strung lanterns coming on people were going to notice if a couple of them just happened to snap off and fly into Bonnie's hands.

As the last rays of the sun disappeared down behind the buildings and it was safe for her to move about without guarding her flesh, Josephine rose to her feet and started walking forward, towards a boy--man, but barely--who had just exited the gazebo. He was rubbing at the Band-aid taped into the elbow of his arm, his expression distracted. Bonnie took a deep breath and tried to walk faster. She couldn't get there before Josephine took the young man by the arm and spoke a few quiet words to him, looking deeply into his eyes all the while. The man's expression became even more vacant for a moment or two before he nodded once and reached up to push Josephine's hoodie back from her head, exposing her wild mass of curls. The tenderness with which he caressed her hair and then the side of her face was better suited to a lover than to a meal, nearly making Bonnie break into a run. She couldn't get to the gazebo before Josephine took the young man by the arm and led him away without fuss through the crowd, but Damon could have. Probably without even using his vampire powers. Had she one of their home-made stakes in her hand, Bonnie thought that she might have been able to kill him.

"Why didn't you do something?" Bonnie demanded when she reached his side.

"We can't do anything out in the open like this," Damon said shortly. He had what Bonnie was rapidly coming to recognize as his hunter's look on, sharp and focused and making it absolutely clear that he hadn't been human for a long, long time. Bonnie grabbed for his arm and squeezed hard; it softened very slightly as he looked towards her. "We'll get there in time."

 _In time for what?_ Bonnie wanted to ask, before she remembered that that was not the important question to be asking, not at this point.

They followed a discreet distance while Josephine led her snack out of the pack and far away from the interference of the crowd. A few people who apparently knew the young man reached out to speak to him or attempt to touch his arm, and Josephine waited patiently at his side as he made the appropriate smiles and excuses to move on his way again. It was no more than ten minutes before the four of them, spaced far apart in their two groups, were the only people on the street. Bonnie listened to the music from the park fading behind them and whispered to Damon, "Now?"

"Now," Damon agreed. He started to leap forward, and Josephine whirled around abruptly with her hand about the young man's throat, keeping his body in front of hers as a shield. His expression didn't register any alarm. Josephine was barely tall enough to peek over his shoulder, but Bonnie could still see that her eyes were black and the map of dark veins were leaping up from her skin.

"Hello, Damon," she said calmly, eyes barely flicking over Bonnie before she dismissed her. "Did you really think that I haven't been watching you all afternoon?"

"Do you really think that I give a damn if you kill a human in front of me?" Damon asked, eyebrows lifting.

"No, I thought that your human might," Josephine said. "She's not compelled." Josephine put her hand up against the young man's throat, peeking over his shoulder at Bonnie. Bonnie rocked her weight from one foot to the other.

"She has a strong stomach," Damon said smoothly. He lunged. Josephine jerked back, fingers tightening about the man's throat, and Bonnie ran forward muttering under her breath. She thought that Josephine would throw her compelled snack at Bonnie, trusting that Bonnie would make an actual attempt to catch him whereas Damon would just let him make an entertaining splat. She, and apparently Damon, didn't plan for the equation to shake down as a human and a vampire on either side. Damon snatched the young man out of the air as easily as if he were catching a stray fly ball, and then tossed him to the side with about as much concern. The boy hit the sidewalk and rolled, didn't rise again. Bonnie stared down the vampire coming at her for approximately half a second before she started mouthing the words of the spell--

Josephine slammed into her, hard, and took them both down to the pavement. Bonnie couldn't stop herself from yelping as her tender shoulder took most of the impact and wishing, just for a moment and in the farthest back of her mind, that she could heal her injuries as quickly and as easily as Damon could shrug off his. Josephine was rendered gray in the shadowy light, and her sunset hair turned into the color of clotting blood.

She hadn't said any magic words when she had been driving Stefan away from his victim. She hadn't had a ritual when she had set a Jetta on fire in a fit of pique. Grams, and then Kayla and Aunt Pamela, had told her over and over again that the words weren't the important part, they were akin to a mnemonic device to focus what was already inside of her. Bonnie concentrated hard and felt Josephine lifting off of her at the same time that Damon appeared and grabbed the redhead by the scruff of the neck. Josephine squealed and flew through the air to land, hard, against the wooden door of an antiques store that was closed, presumably so that its owner could donate a pint or two to charity and enjoy the festivities. She flipped end over end and disappeared into the darkness of the store. Bonnie dimly caught view of her breaking her fall--in a manner of speaking--with her spine against the corner of an end table that looked old, and expensive. Josephine went rigid with pain for less than the time it took Bonnie to draw a breath, while Bonnie was still trying to push herself up to her elbows and hissing through her teeth as her shoulder exploded all over again. Josephine snatched up a shattered piece of the door and leapt towards Bonnie. Bonnie felt the air go still and would swear at herself for being such a freaking cliche later, but she swore that everything slowed down and Josephine was moving in micrometers per second. The makeshift stake that Josephine was holding in her hand would be more than deep enough to puncture any organ on Bonnie's body and force a hell of a lot more than a few stitches in an overnight clinic by way of repair, if Bonnie were to survive at all.

Damon leapt between the two of them, shadow-blur of gray and black in the twilight. Bonnie swore that she saw the tip of the stake piercing Damon's shirt before they again hurled Josephine with a combination of physical and telekinetic power. She went this time through the plate glass window that made up the storefront, and Damon twisted briefly about to look at Bonnie with a face full of--something. Maybe Stefan could have read it, or even Elena, but Bonnie was still professing only a novice's understanding of his particular language and was not certain that she wanted to know more. He followed Josephine through the window, seizing up a piece of glass in his hand as he went. Bonnie picked herself up painfully from the pavement and watched. It turned out that cutting the head off did just as well as staking or fire, and Bonnie made certain that she didn't look away from this one, either.

Damon hopped back out of the antiques store through the window when he was done, his hands covered with blood. Bonnie scrutinized it hard as she pushed herself back up to her feet, but in the scant light she couldn't tell if it looked any different from human. "You want to handle that?" he asked, gesturing back over his shoulder, and Bonnie assumed that he meant by fire. She checked her scraped elbows, saw that the damage was minimal, and stepped up to the window. There was a lot of blood inside. It would be difficult to hide even if she and Damon just moved the body. Still, Bonnie felt a twinge a she murmured the spell and watched a lick of flame start up from a rose-colored ottoman that might even be older than Damon and then leapt down to Josephine's hair. _That's what insurance is for,_ did equal battle against, _Really, you think that Grams would be okay with what you're doing right now?_ The second voice didn't grow any quieter when Bonnie turned and saw that the young man who had been compelled was just starting to twist and stir.

"He'll be fine," Damon said. "Come on." He started to slide his hand beneath Bonnie's elbow, but she pulled away.

Bonnie huffed out an uneasy breath and, unable to make the warring voices stop, turned on a physical target instead. "Why did you do that?" she demanded. When he looked at her with raised eyebrow and confused expression, she stomped forward and pointedly slipped her finger through the hole in the front of his shirt. The flesh underneath was smooth, unharmed, still slightly cooler than it ought to have been if he were human. Maybe he hadn't been punctured at all, but Bonnie thought that that was a long shot.

Damon took Bonnie by the wrist and held on for longer than he needed to before he pushed her away. "We need to be elsewhere," he said, as the fire was already throwing an orange glow across the sidewalk and someone was bound to drive by before too much longer. Bonnie obliged, but still stared at Damon hard as they slipped off down the sidewalk, until he sighed in what sounded like genuine exasperation. "I'm hard to kill, Bonnie. When you know how much you can survive, you play a lot harder than a human does. Don't worry so hard, it'll only give you wrinkles and confuse the hell out of both of us."

Bonnie looked back over her shoulder, where a pickup truck was slamming on the brakes in front of the antique store. They were too far away to be seen, but her skin still prickled. "Do you ever think about what will happen when you do finally die?" she asked. "With everything that you've done?"

Damon made a short barking noise that sounded as if he didn't know whether it was a snort of derision or actual laughter. "Heaven, hell, those are just fairy tales people tell so that they can feel good about not pulling their neighbors' throats out," he snapped. Bonnie shivered and felt her mouth start to twist, but she could still remember what it had been like to set Thomas on fire and how she had disliked the mess without coming anywhere near to regretting the actual doing. "The worst thing that's going to happen to me is that maybe I'll become a ghost and will spend the rest of eternity fucking with Stefan's head without being able to actually hide his stuff." Damon turned his head, gave Bonnie a glittering, wicked smile. "It doesn't seem to bother Emily that much. Who knows, your own grandmother might get bored enough to drop by and rattle some chains before it's all over."

Sirens were starting to wail from down the street. Bonnie still lashed out hard before she knew what she was doing, slamming Damon against the pristine brick facade of an ice cream shop without laying a hand on him. She did it with enough power to make Damon wince and grunt, and send a first twinge of overexertion rolling through Bonnie's body. That had absolutely nothing to do with the other sudden, warm flash that Bonnie felt, or the heat in the way that Damon raised his head and looked at her. His tongue moved out and swiped slowly at his lower lip, while Bonnie knew that her eyes were wide. Though her rage faded nearly as quickly as it had come over her, Bonnie kept Damon pinned against the wall for a moment longer, stepping close and looking at him closely. She could hurt him, regardless of the deal that they had made with one another at the onset of this road trip. She could, and probably wouldn't have been able to do anything about it, and Bonnie really, really thought that they were both liking this detail. She put her hand against the side of Damon's face, never mind that they were outsiders in a small town and she could hear the police coming close, to feel how cool and inhuman he still was. He turned his head slowly to press his lips against her palm, never breaking eye contact with her. In the dim half-light, they were the color of dimes. Bonnie sucked in a deep breath and stepped back, physically as well as magically. Damon stumbled a little as she released him, but still said, "Well, isn't that something."

He was right. It was something...it was something a hell of a lot bigger than setting a shop on fire, and Bonnie dealt with it appropriately.

"Oh, my God," she said, and fled.

End Part Three


	4. Chapter 4

Part Four

Her hands were shaking. She couldn't seem to make them stop. Bonnie shoved them into the pockets of her jeans and walked faster, certain that everyone on the street could take one look at her and know exactly what she had done, and she didn't mean that little spot of felony arson and justified homicide, either. The streets were a lot more crowded now as news of the fire at the antique store spread, and a fire engine wailed past her. Hardeeville was smaller than Mystic Falls, even, and an unfamiliar face was going to stick out, especially after she and Damon had been lurking around the carnival all afternoon waiting for something to happen. She needed to get back to the motel room and get their stuff together, she needed to find Damon and get them out of town--

She really needed to calm down enough so that she could look Damon in the eye again without setting him on fire or having a panic attack. Or having--she had held him up against the wall, she could have hurt him a lot, and she _liked_ that idea. He wasn't human, he could handle a lot and deserved a lot. Bonnie thought that she should maybe be calling this whole thing off before she wound up dangling any further over the edge than she already was.

"Easier said than done," Bonnie said out loud, earning her a look from an older woman holding the hand of a small boy who had obviously been halfway through having his face painted when the ruckus had started. She smiled in what she hoped was a disarming way and continued down the sidewalk.

Okay. So she had thrown Damon up against a wall. No big deal; she had been present in her body while Emily had impaled him on a tree before, she had only promised that she wouldn't go all mind-zappy without provocation, and he had done plenty over the course of his not-life to deserve a lot worse than that. But then she had held him there and had, um, liked it. Liked it a _lot_ , even knowing that she was holding up one of the people directly responsible for her grandmother's death. _Especially_ knowing that. Damon hadn't been trying particularly hard to hide the fact that he had liked it, too, and that took them straight past the sane bounds of their working relationship into a whole new realm of fucked-up. Bonnie put her hand over her mouth and bit down hard on the edge of her thumb, but it didn't work. She still felt all-over hot and tingly, filled with way too much adrenaline and, and... _wanting._ Wanting sex or wanting to hurt someone, she wasn't sure which. These were instincts that shouldn't be mixed, probably, but she didn't seem to have any more control over that than she had over anything else that had been happening in her life for the past several months.

Bonnie made it all the way back to the motel and even laid her hand upon the door to her room before she exclaimed, "Damn it!" and spun around to walk back in the direction that she had come. Hardeeville wasn't Prosperity, didn't have a bar for every occasion on every corner, but they had to have _something_. Bonnie had walked about four blocks down the still-picturesque, if by now more than slightly crowded, main street until she found a store front that had given up the hand-painted signs in favor of green and blue neon. She ducked inside, found it mostly deserted save for a few people sitting at the bar or playing pool. Bonnie slid into a bar stool and put her head into her hands. It wasn't a bonfire or even Tyler Lockwood's basement, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

"Are you sure that you're old enough to be in here, miss?"

Bonnie raised her head and looked at a bartender old enough to be her father, who was raising his eyebrow slightly as he looked her over. Her hesitation before answering made the eyebrow go up even higher before she finally said, "Twenty-two."

"You don't mind if I see some ID, then?" The bartender, if anything, looked even more skeptical than before. Bonnie fished her driver's license from her pocket and, masking what she was doing under a pretense of fumbling with it, tapped her nail against the lacquered surface in a very precise pattern and concentrated. Kayla had been the one to teach Bonnie this particular spell, not Aunt Pamela. She had also implied heavily that Aunt Pamela would have no problem killing them both if she found out that Bonnie had been taught it, but that sometimes teenagers needed to be adults when they were dealing with adult things. The illusion only lasted for a moment or two, but that moment was just long enough; when Bonnie slid her ID across the counter to the bartender, she was aged five years and fully legal to be there.

"Huh," the bartender said after scrutinizing the license hard and giving it back to her.

"My mother was carded until she was thirty-five," Bonnie lied easily, tucking her license back into her pocket. It turned faintly warm in her fingers as the trick faded away, and she couldn't help letting out a small breath of relief that it had lasted that long. She was very certain that Grams would not have approved, but the faint smell clinging to her grandmother's things from her college years wasn't patchouli, either, so they were just going to have to call this one a draw. "I'll have a shot of tequila, please." She put her head back into her hands and didn't raise it again until the shot was in front of her, and then she downed it quickly and ordered another. Okay, so maybe drinking hard liquor in an actual bar was just a few steps farther than drinking illicit beer at a field party, but it had been a night for many, many more reasons than the fact that she had watched a vampire being beheaded by her own maybe-pet vampire at her behest immediately before committing a fairly serious act of vandalism.

Yeah, when viewed in a long line like that, Bonnie was sure that Grams would have a lot more to disapprove of than the fact that Bonnie was in a bar when she should have been at home and getting ready for finals.

 _But I'm doing it for you,_ Bonnie thought, nearly wishing that Damon was right and Grams would pop up again, even as a ghost, so that Bonnie wouldn't be left floundering so alone.

She was enough shots in to feel warm and a little crazy, in a good way and not like she was about to skitter to pieces, by the time that she sensed someone sliding into the empty stool beside her. Bonnie turned her head; Damon had lost the heat that Bonnie had been able to feel even through her barrier of magic and was chill and wry again. He signaled to the bartender and was not asked for ID before he ordered a scotch. Bonnie looked him up and down and thought that he would carry his age throughout eternity as a signal that even the blind could read.

"Funny thing about humans," Damon said easily as he took in Bonnie's flushed face and the shot glasses that she had arrayed in front of her. "When they drink like vampires, they usually suffer consequences for it." He downed his drink in a gulp like he was proving a point.

"I came in here alone for a reason," Bonnie said. Even though it was probably the height of stupidity, she ordered another drink, just to prove to Damon that she could.

"Yeah, but I'll have a whole lot of people pouting at me if I go back to Mystic Falls with you in a box," Damon answered. He grimaced. "And one of them can actually pull it off for an eternity, so no thanks."

"Turn Elena and I'm kicking your ass, and not in the way that apparently gets you off."

"I was referring to Stefan, actually." Damon ordered another drink while Bonnie swiveled so that she could put her elbows back against the bar, crossing one leg over the other and kicking her foot slowly back and forth as she stared at him. Since he was obviously enjoying the attention, and Bonnie was fairly certain that she hadn't given him a come-hither look since, um, _ever_ , then that clearly meant that they were both broken in ways that Bonnie didn't want to think about until she was a lot drunker than she was right now.

"Has anyone ever told you that there is something seriously wrong with you?" Bonnie demanded. The bartender brought her another drink without needing to be asked, which probably ought to have told her something, but did his very best not to acknowledge what was happening right in front of him. The whole bar could probably tell that it was either going to be a fight or a seduction. Just as soon as Bonnie knew which one it was going to be, she would know whether running or standing her ground was going to be the best course of action.

Or the third option. Bonnie didn't know why the hell she had come into the bar at all, it was obviously the worst idea that she had had excepting the whole road-trip-with-a-killer thing in the first place.

"Virtually everyone who has ever known me save for this fine gentleman here, and the night's still young. He might catch up." Damon waggled his fingers at the bartender as he left before he leaned in close, right up against Bonnie's personal space the way that he seemed to like best. Bonnie put her hand against his chest, just her hand and no magic for now, but she didn't push him back even after he leaned up against her palm to test how far she would let him go. She hadn't been wrong, two days before, when she had told herself that Damon could not have possibly looked innocent any time past the age of six, but she hadn't been covering the full degree of it, not even close. With his pupils dilated and the alcohol flushing his cheeks enough to make him look like a real boy again and not just an impossibly attractive wolf in designer clothing...how every single person in this bar didn't know that she was sitting with a predator, Bonnie would never know.

"And what about you, Bonnie?" Damon kept going. He leaned just enough of his weight against Bonnie's hand to remind her that she was allowing him to stay there, but didn't push any further than she was giving permission. Bonnie could count on one hand the number of times that she remembered him addressing her by her actual name, and never in a tone that...never in a tone like that. "I wasn't the only one who got a case of the heaving bosoms out there." He inclined his head just a little, presumably so that he could look into her eyes better, and maybe Bonnie even would have bought it if she had suffered some kind of severe head injury that had rendered her incapable of reading every other signal that he was sending out. Damon's weight was heavy against her palm, but he wasn't coming any closer than Bonnie was allowing as surely as if she were holding a literal leash. They both knew that Bonnie was more than powerful enough to stop him if he decided to slip it. She dipped her chin slightly and thought of how powerfully angry she had been when she had been pinning Damon up against the wall, how that had transformed. She had been angry every day since they had put Grams in the ground, it seemed like. The only bonus to it was that angry was still better than scared and helpless.

"Fine," Bonnie said, and put her hand against the back of Damon's neck to pull him in.

She expected Damon to kiss her like he was going to war, but he started so softly that she wasn't aware of him closing the distance between them at first until he put one hand into her hair, thumb just barely grazing her throat. The scotch had made his lips warm, more like a human's, and he kissed exactly like Bonnie would have expected from someone with a century and a half of hedonism in which to practice. Damon didn't startle when Bonnie took the lead, either; she kind of thought that he had been waiting for that all along. She put one hand against the bar and the other on his thigh in order to steady herself and swirled her tongue through his mouth, not tasting blood or death like she had been half-fearing, just male and faint smokiness of the liquor. Bonnie drew back with her lips tingling of scotch.

"I am about two drinks away from not being able to feel my face," she informed Damon by way of commentary when they parted. "If I'm going to be an idiot, now's a good time." One corner of Damon's mouth curved up, and he held two fingers up to the bartender before Bonnie grabbed his hand and pushed it back down to the counter. She grabbed the side of his face and pulled him back down for another, listening/feeling him making a satisfied noise against her mouth. "Stop that, and come on before I have a chance to come to my senses." She threw down money for her share of the drinks while Damon did the same with his own.

Outside, Bonnie lifted her hair off of the back of her neck so that the night breeze could whisk away the sweat collecting there and asked, "Why did you step in for me, earlier?"

Damon rolled his eyes. He hadn't had as much to drink as she had, for one thing, but even what he had consumed didn't seem to be affecting him more than the slight additional color in his cheeks. "I already told you. You're fun when you're cranky." He leaned close when she frowned at him, as if that was going to get him another kiss. "And you can't do that if you're dead." When Bonnie didn't put her hand against his chest to keep him at a distance, she found his own around her waist and his mouth at her ear. "I can also respect a good obsession. I don't have any nefarious plans afoot, Bonnie, take it for what it's worth."

Bonnie shivered, thought hard for a long moment about what she was doing here, and then decided that she had done more thinking and worrying since discovering that she was a witch than she had ever wanted to do in her entire life. She turned her lips to the skin beneath Damon's ear. He didn't jump, but she could feel his throat move up and down all the same as she put her hand on the back of his neck to keep him from pulling away, her hand against his jaw so that he couldn't kiss her on the mouth again just yet. Bonnie thought that he was going to make an attempt to woo her, show her some of that supposedly irresistible Damon charm. He said, "What do you want to do about the two other vampires?"

Bonnie jerked hard and looked around to see two figures at the far end of the street having a conversation that had started out intense and was only going to get more so, if the way that they were waving their hands about was any indication. Friends of Josephine's, maybe. "Are they from the tomb?" she asked. _Does it matter?_

Damon squinted. "Nope," he said. "Innocent bystanders." Her hand on the back of his neck flexed before she could stop herself. "So to speak. So what do you want me to do about them?" He dipped his head, touched his lips for the barest of moments to Bonnie's jaw, and pulled back before she could stiffen. "Unless you want to handle them yourself?"

Bonnie watched one of the vampires glance up at them and then away again, disinterested. If they even realized that Damon was a vampire, then he had his hands around the waist of a human girl who was peeking out from beneath his chin, looking to all appearances to be every inch the damsel just waiting for the prince to find her before the dragon bit down. Nothing worth bothering over. She wasn't even aware that she was tightening and loosening her fingers against the back of Damon's neck until he took her hand in his own and pulled it away.

"No, I want you to do it," Bonnie said, an edge to her voice. Damon glanced down at her. She thought that she had even startled him, but he glided off as the vampires disappeared around the corner together, one hand going to the back of his jacket and producing one of the handmade stakes from the motel room. Her head spinning slightly, Bonnie leaned back against the building and waited. It was just occurring to her that she ought to be getting worried when Damon reappeared, twirling the stake idly in his hand. There was a tear in his shirt and a long wound on his ribcage that closed itself up as Bonnie watched.

"Wow," Bonnie said.

Damon pointed the stake at her. "One of us had to remember to carry them sooner or later," he said.

"No, I meant 'wow, you really liked doing that,'" Bonnie went on.

Damon's face twitched before he answered, "I never pretended to be Superman, don't go making doe eyes at me like you're disappointed."

"Because I told you to do it," Bonnie continued as if Damon hadn't spoken. The street lamps weren't much, his face was more shadow and faint, reflected neon glow from the bar sign than it was anything else, but Bonnie still thought that she saw his eyes get darker. "Pot and really twisted kettle, I know."

They made it back to the motel, and if Damon saw any other vampires then he didn't feel the need to point them out to her. Inside Bonnie's room by some kind of mutual, unspoken agreement, Damon tossed the stake in the general direction of the dresser it had been made from before he leaned back up against the remains, folding his arms over his chest. "What?" Bonnie asked when he seemed content to remain still like that and looking at her for the rest of the night.

"I thought that we had already established that you were the one who liked being in control here," Damon said. He still said it like a challenge, though, and so Bonnie answered with one of her own: "Get on the bed."

Damon slid away from the dresser and onto the bed with a deceptive, lazy slowness, toeing his boots off as he went. His nearly anthropomorphic eyebrow went up as he did so, "Unless you want to stay dressed?"

"For now," Bonnie answered shortly, and gave Damon her very sweetest smile when he looked surprised for the barest of seconds before managing to cover it up again. Someone was calling someone's bluff here, but hell if Bonnie was quite certain who, quite yet. She climbed onto the bed herself and straddled Damon easily, taking up the lapels of his shirt in either hand. He gripped her waist, then her hips, to hold her against him, but didn't try to venture any further north or south into dangerous territory. Because like she had told him to go after the vampires in the alley, she hadn't told him that he could go any further yet, and _fuck_. Bonnie's mouth tasted strange and then stranger still when she kissed Damon again, a lot harder than she had in the bar. He opened himself to her with an eager little noise from the back of his throat and then a disappointed one when Bonnie broke their mouths apart, but continued to let their foreheads rest against one another. His eyes were dark; he dipped his chin up for another kiss that Bonnie wasn't willing to let him have just yet.

"This doesn't change anything," Bonnie told him. She put her hands against Damon's on her hips and squeezed a bit, making certain that he was paying attention to her, even though she was sitting in his lap and could tell that if there was one thing in this world she had under her full control, it was Damon Salvatore's attention. "No biting, no compulsion."

"I don't have to compel sex," Damon said with a little lift at one corner of his mouth. "Everything else is another story. So you don't have to worry, in case you think that I'm backdoor whammying you or something."

Bonnie sank back onto her haunches and considered without feeling particularly sorry for the fact that she was visibly making him uncomfortable as she did so. "You are the very last person I would expect to make sure you weren't going to be taking advantage of me."

"I'm more worried that you're going to decide being hammered was a backdoor way of breaking the compulsion clause," Damon said, though he still seemed to be having zero problem with the location of Bonnie's hands. "If I'm going to need to run in the morning, it's only ladylike to give me a head start."

"Trust me, Damon, I know that this is a bad idea," Bonnie said. "But it wouldn't be my first." She pulled her shirt over her head and threw it in the vague direction of her bags while Damon did the same. He was long and lean and pale, shadows dipping into the curve of his hipbones and along his collar. Bonnie took a deep breath and asked herself for the last time if she wanted to do this, because alcohol, trauma, and the tinge of mescaline were going to make horrible excuses in the morning if she wasn't. She remembered how it had felt when she had chucked Damon back against the wall and when she had sent him off after the vampires outside the bar and for better or worse had her answer, not to mention a whole new ache between her thighs. Damon picked her up by her hips and slid her beneath his body, their pelvises aligned.

"No biting," Bonnie reminded Damon as he returned his hands to her waist, rubbing his thumb in a circle near her navel and leaning down as though he were smelling of her neck. She wrapped her fingers through Damon's hair when his answer was a low chuckle and tugged back hard. His eyes were all pupil as she did and, God help her, she wanted him even more that way. She and Caroline had flicked through entirely the wrong kind of porn, that one time at Tina Fell's when they had all been giggling to themselves and hurrying to clear the browser history and hide the wine coolers before Tina's mom came back.

"Don't you know how good I am at following directions?" Damon murmured against the side of her neck. He tugged against the grip that Bonnie was maintaining on him to see how far she would let him go and then smirked when she relaxed her fingers-- _man of his word, right_ \--licked at the place where her pulse ran closest to the surface as if he were making a point. When Bonnie sighed, he nipped her, hard, just this side of breaking the flesh and making it clear that he knew how closely he was flirting with the rules when she grabbed his chin and made him look at her. "Come on, now, Bonnie." He damn sure hadn't said her name like that even in the bar, like he was turning it into some dirty new sex act in and of itself. "It's not fair to make up the rules all by yourself."

"Damon? Shut up." Bonnie gripped Damon by the back of the neck and tested her hold over the driver's seat by urging him lower; he went willingly, lips suddenly so light against her skin that Bonnie hardly knew he was there, over the line of the bra that she still had on and down her navel, pausing at the hem of her jeans. It was strange to feel his breath fanning across her skin while he unbuttoned her pants and slid them down her legs, thumb just brushing against the dip of her navel. He rose up again and traced a circle there with his tongue that cooled rapidly and raised goose pimples on he flesh while Bonnie made an irritable sound, and even then teased her through her panties until the stupid things were virtually useless before he finally slid his fingers beneath the elastic, testing her. "You are such a dick, oh, my God," Bonnie finally snapped, grabbing his hand and shoving it where it needed to be, gasping when she found it. Wasn't like she hadn't warned him that she thought of him as a tool, after all. Damon laughed and sounded genuine for the first time since Bonnie had known him, probably, and started to hook her panties off of her hips and down her legs. " _What?_ " Bonnie snapped when he paused at her knees.

Damon did that eye-thing of his, where he pretended to be innocent and only wound up looking more guilty than ever. "I thought that you would have been more..." He stopped and made a vague gesture. "Maidenly than this, somehow."

Fire would have to rain down from the sky before Bonnie told him that that little issue had been handled by Tyler Lockwood during the Great Bodyshot Debacle of '08, since no else knew about it other than Elena and, well, Tyler himself, and he had been pretty effectively threatened into silence. "That is so not your fetish and we both know it," she finally answered, earning Damon's real smile from him again. He kissed the inside of her knee, more gentlemanly than she would have expected, and finished sliding her panties down her legs before he crawled up the length of her body, stopped at the juncture of her thighs.

Bonnie looked up towards the ceiling and still jumped when Damon's mouth touched her, on the sensitive inner skin of her thigh rather than where she wanted it most, because if there was one thing that she needed to keep in mind here it was that she was still in bed with a son of a bitch. He nipped at her there, too, the hell of it being that the heat and ache at the juncture of her thighs grew even deeper, before he leaned back and blew a cool stream of air against the slight hurt that still made Bonnie jump.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Bonnie finally gasped, and grabbed the side of Damon's face to urge him where he should have been in the first place. He had a dimple when he smiled, she could feel it against her palm. He pressed his lips to the very juncture of her sex and inner thigh before he began, and it wasn't more than a few minutes before Bonnie's breath was coming faster and she had a whole new reason to forget why this was, no, really, _a supremely bad idea_. One hundred and fifty years of practice. Might have known that it would apply to more than kissing. Bonnie arched her hips off of the bed and gripped Damon's hair hard when he found just the right place and went to it with a dedication, still saying, "There, there, right there." Damon put one of her legs over his shoulder and had his hand upon her other hip while Bonnie shuddered. She swore that she felt him start to lean back when she was getting close and tightened the grip that she had in his hair. "Don't you fucking dare." Damon's eyes lifted, gleaming; they were still making eye contact when she finally came, hard and hearing a keen rising from her throat, and this time made the neighbor on the other side of the room smack the wall in protest.

"I did not think that you had that kind of mouth on you," Damon said as he leaned back on his heels, as gracefully as a cat and clearly every bit as satisfied with himself.

"Bad time to point out the obvious, but." Bonnie made a vague gesture and then let her hand flop down to the bedspread. She sat up and grabbed Damon by his belt, dragged him up the length of her body and delighted in the small, surprised noise that Damon made even as he moved to obey. He was right, he _did_ take direction well, and it was if anything even hotter here than it had been out on the street. "Come here." She started unbuttoning the front of Damon's pants without preamble while he braced himself up on his arms above her.

"Does Elena know that you're this bossy?" he asked, sounding bemused but not unappreciative. Well, since Bonnie was helping to get his pants off and then putting her hand on his cock, she would certainly hope not,

"Get the pillow-fight sleepover fantasies out of your head, ew," Bonnie said. She stroked Damon a few more times and guided him into her, wrapping her legs around his waist and making an involuntary sound from the back of her throat when Damon grabbed her ass, hard, to pull her even more fully against him, turned on more than she was certain that she wanted to admit by the faint hesitancy in Damon's actions. He wasn't quite certain of what was happening here? Neither was Bonnie, but she _liked_ it. She was barely even coming down, but already she could feel her belly and lower tightening, sweet and fluttery. The Great Bodyshot Debacle was hazy with the ill-advised combo of orange jello and cheap vodka, but Bonnie remembered that it had been awkward and a little painful, not least because she highly suspected that Tyler hadn't had any more of an idea of what he was doing than Bonnie had. Discovering that Damon had been screwing his time away since he had been turned was...no, Bonnie couldn't say that that was an unexpected revelation, so she guessed that she might as well just enjoy the results. She braced herself with one hand on the back of Damon's neck, flexing her fingers when he hit something just right and listening to his breathing get deeper every time, and grabbed his ass hard enough to bruise, probably, if he had been human to urge him deeper into her.

"Like you mean it," Bonnie ordered into his ear.

"I really wish that I had figured this out about you sooner," Damon said in an appreciative tone, only letting go of Bonnie's rear so that he could touch at her face, her throat, the lace trimming on the bra that she had still not taken off, rocking into her at an increasingly fast and erratic pace. It was good, but it wasn't quite _there_ , and Bonnie could feel herself getting frustrated until something flipped them both over without warning and put her on top, and Bonnie didn't even realize at first that it had been her. Damon started up at her, startled in the same way that Bonnie was, and then he tightened his grip upon her even harder. Damon had his hands on her hips to guide the rhythm while Bonnie splayed her hand out against his abdomen and discovered that vampires could sweat as well as breathe, when their motivation was right. She dug her nails into his abdomen until half-moons rose up under the pressure, dragged her nails down his sides and watched the red marks fade away within seconds while Damon made a short, sharp sound. It was good to be around someone who couldn't die, couldn't even really be hurt, and it helped so much.

"Keep going," she growled down to Damon, and he nodded jerkily as she shifted herself up and down onto his cock. The change in angle was _perfect_ , and she hardly noticed that Damon was pulling her taut against him, tasting the fine beads of sweat that were collecting on her neck and chest, because the black hole of tension in her belly was reversing all of the rules of creation and exploding outward into stars that Bonnie felt in the tips of her fingers and behind her eyes, so many and so exquisitely that she could nearly forget, for the moment, who had brought them about.

End Part Four


	5. Chapter 5

Part Five

She hadn't packed aspirin. Enough clothes for two weeks, easily, Emily's spell book, an iPod for crucial Damon-ignoring times, and a picture of Grams, but no aspirin. She was an _idiot_.

Bonnie kept her eyes carefully closed and focused on taking long, slow breaths through her nose for several minutes before she attempted to move, counting herself lucky that she hadn't bothered opening up the curtains while she had been settling in the day before. She was pretty sure that she could make up a spell to pull the sun right out of the sky, if she tried hard enough.

They. As in plural. As in, Bonnie had gotten extremely ill-advisedly trashed the night before and decided that having sex with Damon Salvatore, who so far as she knew was only cutting out the regular murderous rampages because he was playing some kind of extended practical joke on his brother, was a _good_ plan. The near-constant rage hangover that she had been running around with, and the _actual_ hangover with which she was dealing right now, both seemed tame by comparison. Bonnie started breathing a little faster, though she determinedly kept her eyes shut and refused to stretch out her limbs and explore the rest of the bed to see if Damon had gone back to his own room after she had passed out.

"I can hear you, you know."

That answered that question. Bonnie rolled over, wincing as her head and stomach were two seconds too slow to keep up with the rest of her body and all-over just not happy besides, and found Damon lying on his back, head turned to look at her. If the rest of him was as naked as his chest, then it looked as if he had been there all night. Bonnie put her hand against her head and wondered if her skills were refined enough to telekinetically bring a glass of water to her from the bathroom before even the wondering became too painful and she had to stop.

"I should have stuck with Grams' pot," Bonnie muttered. She sat up in the bed, pooling the bedclothes around her waist. Damon remained on his back and looking at her, the movement of her yanking the sheets up to keep herself decent just nearly making it impossible for him to stay so. Bonnie stared at the long, pale line of his thigh and hip and asked herself if it was really too early to be having another drink. She tried to pull her eyes up and to Damon's face, but that meant eyeballing the abs that she had been too hazy to pay nearly enough attention to the night before. Damon was warring between smirking and raising his eyebrows by the time that Bonnie actually reached his face.

"I really would not have expected that of her," he mused, making the catch-all fluttering gesture beside his head again. And just like that, Bonnie was back down on earth, and the thigh was just a thigh again.

"You didn't know her," Bonnie said shortly. Damon rolled his eyes and shifted, clearly about to get out of the bed, before Bonnie grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back. She managed to throw her leg over his body without entirely disentangling herself from the bedclothes and pinned both of Damon's hands down by his sides, just hard enough to let him know that she meant business even though he was always going to have the drop on her when it came to brute strength. First observation: vampires were capable of morning wood just as much as they were capable of sweating and recreational breathing. Second observation: when Bonnie leaned just a little bit more of her weight down onto Damon's wrists, he really, really liked it, and more to the point, he was not the only one.

Bonnie told herself to focus now and panic about the fact that she very well might have a future of being called Mistress ahead of her later, and asked Damon, "Are you screwing with me?" If he was--if this was a trick--she was learning all kinds of things that she was capable of.

"It's not fair if you only lob the easy balls at me," Damon complained, moving within her grip so that he was holding her wrists, too. Bonnie glanced down at her hips and saw the marks of fingers there; his skin was as unblemished as if he had never been a real boy at all.

She leaned close, until they were nearly nose to nose, and didn't crack a smile. "I am not kidding," she said. "If this is some kind of game, or master plan, our little deal is over."

Even though she swore that his face didn't move, something shut down all the same. Damon took her by the hips and lifted her off of him before he rolled from the bed and reached for his pants. "Got it in one," he said, rolling his eyes. "I got you drunk and kinky so that I could get laid--no, wait. Pretty sure you handled both of those things without my help at all. And if you're going to take it back and go all--" The gesture. "Then you owe me a head start."

"I didn't do anything that I didn't want to do," Bonnie said flatly. "And not anything that we're going to do again, either."

Damon didn't have to be facing her for Bonnie to know that he was rolling his eyes. "You might have a sharper mouth than Stefan," he said. "But I really do not know why the two of you aren't better friends." When he was still shirtless, but at least a little more decent, Damon leaned in close and braced himself with one hand to either side of her thighs. Bonnie put her hand against the dip where his collarbones and throat came together, not pushing just yet in any of the ways that she could push. "One night stand, I'm an evil creature of the night, you can't believe that you let yourself become so impure, blah-blah-blah."

"Careful," Bonnie said dryly. "You're starting to sound like women have said this to you before."

Damon was close enough that she thought he was about to kiss her, and she wasn't leaning back. Because she was fucked in the head. And he had bought her orange juice. Yeah, the math of it wasn't adding up to her, either. "If you're not nice to me, I won't let you hold me down again next time."

 _Sure you would,_ Bonnie thought. She folded her legs under her and watched the line of Damon's back as he bent to look for his boots. Bonnie concentrated, and one of them flew from beneath the bed into Damon's hand; he raised his eyebrows at her.

"That your version of an apology?" he asked.

"For thinking that you might be doing exactly what you have a long history of doing? Please." Bonnie started to get from the bed herself, ignoring the flash of self-consciousness as she she could feel Damon's eyes on her. "I get the first shower."

"Says who?" Damon knelt to see if his other boot was beneath the bed, too, and made a frustrated noise when Bonnie didn't make any move to help him with that one.

"The one paying for the room, that's who. You _do_ have one, you know." Bonnie reached the bathroom and unhooked her bra before she leaned back out to throw it in the general direction of her bag. She used the door as a shield around which to peek in the meanwhile so that she could continue talking with Damon, remembering the way that he had put his hand against her back two nights before when he hadn't had time to realize that he was doing it. "Besides, aren't southern gentleman supposed to be all chivalrous or something?" Damon lifted himself up from his digging under the bed so that he could smile at her. "I'm just saying, you have no excuse for not knowing better."

"You know where chivalry comes from?" Damon gave up on the bed and came towards her in his pants only, putting his hand up against the door and smirking when Bonnie kept it between them. "The idea in the Middle Ages that women were these beautiful flowers to be put up on pedestals and worshipped, but only from afar. You weren't ever supposed to actually touch them." He tapped his finger against the door. "So I only got part of the lesson. Tell me that I still get credit for at least learning it _really well._ "

Bonnie tilted her head to the side and regarded Damon for a long moment. "I'm pretty sure your other shoe is under the dresser," she said, and shut the door.

*  
One hour and two cups of coffee later, Bonnie felt slightly more human, though she was still fairly certain that eating anything more substantial than a Tic-Tac was going to be a grave mistake. She made an unhappy noise as soon as she left the motel room to throw her bag in the backseat, even with her sunglasses already on, and fished for her keys so that she could throw them at Damon. "Unless you want vampire-hunting to be cut short while I throw up on you."

"Beautiful flowers to be worshipped from afar," Damon repeated, doing his eye-thing at her. The next time that Bonnie talked to Elena, she was going to ask her if she had noticed that there were subtleties in it like a mood ring.

Bonnie made a face at him and settled down into the passenger seat. Next stop, Miami. She fiddled with the rims of her sunglasses, trying to settle them more firmly onto her face. The sun was _angry_ , it was the only explanation. "Funny you should say that."

"Hmm?" Damon backed the car out of the space and turned them south, making a series of highly entertaining unhappy noises as he went. "Why the hell you drive this thing is beyond me, it's the vehicular equivalent of a Morkie."

"I like Morkies. I would think that you would be more environmentally-conscious, given how long you're going to be around." Damon made a dismissive gesture. "No. Back to the pedestal thing."

"It's been roundly agreed by you and just about every other person I've ever met that I'm not exactly stable, don't go getting a swelled head."

"You like being bossed around. I--" Bonnie took a deep breath. "Kinda like bossing you around. Let's unpack all of that when we're back in Mystic Falls and won't be fighting for our lives on a nightly basis, okay? I want to talk about something serious." Damon slid her a sidelong look, frowning even though she had just knocked any and all discussions of what last night had "meant" or whatever right off of the table. She had a pheromone that attracted vampires. At least this one was proving useful and seemed to be committed to stabbing her in the front. She would deal with what that meant on a large scale, when she didn't have him committed not eating people on pain of brain-explosion any longer, when they were back home. "That whole courtly love thing you were spewing earlier." Bonnie straightened and slid her sunglasses down so that she could make eye contact with Damon over the top of them. "By all accounts, the last woman that you put up like that was the same woman who _owned_ my ancestor, that doesn't raise any red flags with you?"

Damon sighed as if he couldn't believe that they were even stooping to have this conversation, and Bonnie reminded herself hard that she had promised to bring back the brain explosions only in the event of murder, compulsion, or uninvited people-snacking. "Bonnie, I hate nearly everyone for exactly the same reasons." She kept looking at him over the top of her glasses. "Seriously. You can't flip through cable news without hearing at least one heartwarming human interest story a week about the attention-whoring bastard who overcame his bigotry in the name of the greater good." Somehow, when Damon said words like "greater good", he made it sound like a venereal disease. "And that's in one human lifetime. I'm rounding into my third." Damon glanced over, noticed that Bonnie was still watching him, and reached out to push her sunglasses back up her face. "You probably should have asked me that before you slept with me."

"Probably," Bonnie agreed. "But if that turns out to be the least-wrong thing that I did last night, I'm going to suck it up and call it good." She rummaged about in the glove compartment for the aspirin of the previous morning and dry-swallowed three, grimacing a little at the bitter aftertaste. The grimace deepened as she fingered the phone in her pocket, but since they were rounding into their third day here, she didn't guess that she could put it off any longer. Especially not when she wasn't sure what they were going to be facing down in Miami. She turned on the phone and punched in a number, warning Damon as she did so, "No color commentary," and not realizing until it was too late that she had essentially guaranteed it.

Her father answered on the first ring even though it had to be showing up as an unfamiliar number on the caller ID. "Bonnie?"

Bonnie cringed further down into her seat, picturing his face perfectly well without needing to see it. "Hi, Daddy."

"Bonnie Bennett, what the _hell_ are you thinking, do you have any idea what you've put me through?" Her father sounded much more scared than he did angry, and Bonnie cringed harder still.

"I know, I know," she said. "I'm sorry, it's just--it's something that I really, really have to do, and then I'll come home. I promise." She could feel Damon cutting his eyes towards her, but ignored him. She kept her word every bit as much as he did, and she if she didn't see this thing to the end, it would only be because burning the whole world down to make it happen wasn't an option.

"Bonnie, sweetheart, I'm not--I promise I'm not mad." He sounded like he meant it, too. Bonnie put her hand over her face while Damon studiously kept his eyes on the road. "I'm _worried_ about you, you've been so angry since your grandmother passed, and it's not healthy to be carrying that around inside of you."

Four dead vampires total, one of them by her hand and two more than she ought to get at least half-credit for using Damon's kink to aim him like a weapon. "I'm...I'm finding an outlet," Bonnie said. One that couldn't exactly be billed on anyone's insurance, but whatever. "Daddy, I have to go, I just wanted to let you know that I'm safe, I'm coming home soon, and I already know that I won't see daylight again until graduation. This is just--you have to trust me, this is really important."

"Is that boy--"

Bonnie hung up the phone hurriedly and then turned it off for good measure. "Crap," she said.

"I told you that you shouldn't have trusted Caroline," Damon said, eyes still on the road. Bonnie waited warily for him to bring up the other parts of the conversation that he clearly must have heard, but he went on, "Been a long time since anyone called me a 'boy', though."

"Your ego can take it." Bonnie looked out the passenger window for a long moment, chewing on the edge of her thumbnail, before ultimately deciding that there was nothing else to do other than bite the bullet. "Do Elena and Stefan know where you are?"

"Stefan's used to me taking off without warning," Damon said. "It'll be fine."

That wasn't exactly an answer. "What about Elena?"

"What about her?" Damon caught her rolled eyes and said, "Pot and kettle, little witch. And Elena at least knows that I can take care of myself. Have _you_ told her where you are?"

Bonnie slumped a little lower in her seat. "Elena and I are having a hard time right now," she said. "Over you and Stefan."

She expected a sarcastic retort, but Damon only said, "I expected as much. Elena might be a lot younger than Stefan, but she has talent. She can brood in two different directions at once." He didn't say it like an insult. Bonnie stayed quiet, still chewing on the edge of her nail. There was nothing to break up the silence but road noise until Damon said, "It's not the first time that I've been someone's bad decision, cleansing breaths."

"I'm fine," Bonnie said.

"Of course you are."

"I'm _fine_ ," Bonnie insisted, more vehemently. _Just as soon as you take the fact that I slept with a killer, am embarking on a crazed revenge mission, and I liked watching those vampires die more than I probably should._ "What are you going to do when we get back to Mystic Falls?"

"Have a tearful reunion with Stefan and a cliche about Disney World."

"I _mean_ it," Bonnie said, and Damon looked at her. "What are you going to do? Where are you going to get your blood?"

"Ah, that. I thought that you were too keyed up on vengeance to worry about petty little details."

"I won't be forever," Bonnie said as if she were making a promise, both to herself and to her only witness.

"Sometimes you little humans remind me of just how little you've seen, that you think it's going to be just like that," Damon said in a musing tone. Bonnie poked him hard in the arm when he didn't seem particularly interested in answering her question. "I haven't taken human blood from anything other than a plastic bag in months, relax. The whole town's too keyed up on vampires to risk it."

"Not exactly the answer that I wanted," Bonnie said, turning back and chewing on her thumbnail again.

"Like I said." Damon's voice didn't match the rest of him. "You are not the first time that I've been someone's bad decision, and you won't be the last. Let's just take our agreement for what it is until the last vampire is in the ground and then head home, all right?" He showed her his teeth, and they glittered in the sunlight that he shouldn't be allowed to ride around in to begin with. "I might just win you over by then."

End Part Five


	6. Chapter 6

Part Six

They stayed mostly quiet throughout the drive to Miami; Bonnie had enough going through her own mind to keep her busy, but she would have figured Damon the type to keep up a constant prattle both to annoy her and because driving didn't allow him to touch everything within reach. She was surprised when he was mostly content with the radio. By late afternoon, they were passing through the Miami city limits and Damon was adjusting his sunglasses on his face. Bonnie glanced over him, sensing something different in the gesture. God help her, she thought that she was developing fluency.

"What is it?" Bonnie asked.

"We're not in a small town anymore, Bonnie." Damon changed lanes without signaling and threw his middle finger over his shoulder when the car behind them honked indignantly. "Like I said. Do you know how many hunting grounds there are in Miami?"

Bonnie made a face. "Can you say 'bars and clubs' and at least try not to make me throw up in my mouth?"

Damon laughed a little. "It's a tourist city," he said. "People come, people go, they spend lots of money for the chance to do dumb shit without consequences." He stuck his thumb back over his shoulder. The car behind them honked again. "Oh, for fuck's sake, get a thicker skin." Back to Bonnie, "It started being a hunting ground the second we passed the city limits sign."

She folded her arms over her chest. "So, what you're telling me is that we're going to be needle in a haystacking it from this point forward?"

"Not necessarily." Damon took them off of the highway and eventually into a residential area, old houses with citrus trees heavy with fruit in the front yards and paint peeling quietly off the porches and down into the grass. Bonnie stared at Damon hard, until he sighed. "Is this going to be a twenty-four hour arrangement?"

"I told you that we weren't doing that again." It probably should have told her something about herself that she knew exactly what he was referring to without needing to ask, though. Bonnie shivered once, then shivered again when Damon flashed her that crooked smirk without fully taking his eyes off of the road. "I don't know," she said. "Do you want to redraw the original rules?"

Damon snorted, but Bonnie still thought that he did it as a cover for another sound. "Maybe," he said. "Let's play it by ear for awhile. After all, I'm hard to hurt."

"I don't--" Bonnie shook her head and watched the trees go by. "It's not about that."

"It's more about that than you want to say out loud," Damon said softly. He smiled when Bonnie remained silent. "But back to the business at hand. There's someone in Miami who might be able to help us. But you have to promise that you won't set her on fire first and then ask questions later."

"This someone is a vampire," Bonnie said. Her stomach twisted, but she had already gone from working with a vampire to fucking one, she wasn't sure that she had that much sturdy ethical ground under her feet. On the other hand, she hadn't made any promises to this vampire, either. "Will she be willing to play by our rules?"

"Which ones?" Damon was obviously amused by Bonnie's glare. Yeah. Twenty-four hours a day, her ass. She wouldn't be able to handle the strain of hanging onto a leash that long. "She's interested in keeping her head down. Beyond that, you're going to have to make a choice. Do you want to take out a whole lot of vampires, period, or do you want to take out the ones who killed your grandmother?"

"It can't be first and second?" Bonnie chewed on the edge of her thumbnail and finally made a quick, flicking gesture of assent. Damon took them deeper through a maze work of houses that didn't look as if they had been adequately cared for in years. The grass was so green that Bonnie had to push her sunglasses more firmly onto her eyes, and the smell of oranges and lemons was sharp and sweet to the point of being nearly overpowering. Bonnie saw dozens of the fruits lying out on lawns, rotting.

"Classy place," she said.

"Florida wasn't terribly kind to her while she was still alive," Damon said. "Some people just love to tongue sore teeth."

"Some people sure do," Bonnie said wryly. She held up her hand. "If you compare me to a tongue, I will never touch you again." Damon didn't smirk and point out that she had already told him that she was never going to touch him again. Point to whom, Bonnie was not quite sure. "Look how many times you and your brother have come back to Mystic Falls."

"Touche." Damon pulled the car over to the curb in front of a house that nearly looked as if it could have been made of gingerbread, and was doing just about as well in the humid, salty air. Bonnie scuffed her shoes through the grass and kicked at a lemon that had fallen from a tree in the front yard, branches so overgrown that that they caught at Bonnie's hair as she passed under them. Damon pulled down a cluster of leaves and crushed them idly between his fingers as he led Bonnie up the porch steps. They creaked under her feet so alarmingly that she half-expected the door to swing open all on its own.

"Your friend is really going to help us hunt down vampires?" she asked, while Damon visibly measured the length of the shadows extending down the porch steps.

"If we give her a good enough reason."

"Doesn't take much to get you guys turning on each other, does it?" Bonnie leaned up against the porch railing while Damon lifted his hand to knock, then decided that that was a bad plan as it wobbled dangerously beneath her.

Damon scarcely brushed his knuckles against the door before he dropped his hand to look at her, but a few flakes of paint still floated down to the porch. "Be glad for the universe's small mercies, Bonnie," he told her. "Humanity would not do well if vampires _didn't_ turn on each other so easily. Tigers are sexy, but wolves are the ones who get things done."

 _And tigers don't have alphas,_ Bonnie thought as she wiggled around to find a place on the railing that would actually support her and Damon resumed knocking. They waited for so long that Bonnie was starting to think that they might have just met a vampire who didn't leave forwarding addresses before the door swung open and showed the figure within. She stayed well back from the porch and even the vaguest hint of of light, though the sun was sinking down below the house she would have been safe as far out as the grass.

"Matilda," Damon said lightly.

"It's been a long time, Damon," the woman said, coming out a little farther. She was black, slim and petite like a dancer, curls held back from her face with a headband and gaze focusing on Bonnie as it had been guided there by radar. Matilda's eyes moved over her in a long, slow way before she turned back to Damon, lips thinning. "Why?"

"Can we come in?" Bonnie asked abruptly, lifting herself off of the porch railing. Damon shifted himself to the side so that there was a clear path between Matilda and Bonnie. Which one he was clearing the way for, Bonnie was not entirely certain.

"Forward," Matilda remarked. She looked at Damon hard. "Your tastes haven't changed." Damon and Bonnie found common ground long enough to glare at her in tandem as she shifted to the side for them to enter without saying a word. Bonnie guessed that the same rules of invitation didn't apply to the homes of vampires as they did to humans. She and Damon filed silently past Matilda, while Bonnie listened to the snick of the door shutting behind them.

 _That's not at all ominous,_ Bonnie thought, though she also reminded herself that the door was made of wood, and Matilda didn't know what Bonnie could do. She flexed her fingers in and out of fists a few times and made certain that she was ready, if it should come down to that.

The inside of Matilda's house was an almost direct reversal from the outside. While the outside of the house had long strips of paint peeling off like shedding skin where there was paint left at all, overgrown shrubs, and lemons rotting on the grass like golf balls, the inside was all quietly gleaming wood and Tiffany glass, furniture that could have come straight out of the antiques store that Bonnie and Damon had allowed to burn down. Bonnie felt an urge to run her finger along the edge of an end table to see if she would be able to come up with even a speck of dust, and maybe open up a drawer or two to see if there wasn't a photo of Matilda in full flapper regalia inside. Damon settled down on the edge of the sofa and made a grandiose gesture Bonnie's way, putting it into her court.

"We need your help," Bonnie told Matilda.

"Really." Matilda folded her arms over her chest. She had the curtains drawn and only a few lamps on inside the house. "Why do I care?" Matilda was up in Bonnie's face before Bonnie even saw her move, looking deeply into Bonnie's eyes. Bonnie hissed and was about to bodily move Matilda to a safer distance before Matilda sidled back of her own accord. "He doesn't have you compelled."

"She has a certain natural charm," Damon said from his space on the edge of the sofa. "Don't want to squander it."

Matilda rocked back, looking at the way that Bonnie and Damon were positioned in relation to each other, mirrored body language and a united front. "Oh, Damon," she mused, "you are so very predictable."

"You're still living in a state that you have every reason that you despise," Damon told her smoothly. "Our routines are long, but they're still our routines."

Tigers never did get along when they were placed in close quarters with one another. Neither did wolves, when they were from different packs. Bonnie placed herself between Matilda and Damon and said firmly, "There are a group of vampires in Miami that Damon and I are very interested in killing. You can help us find out where they are."

Matilda's jaw went a little slack, and she looked rapidly towards Damon as if she were asking for confirmation. He lifted his shoulder into a shrug. "She has a way of getting what she wants," was all that he said.

"Why on God's earth would I help you turn against my own species?" Matilda asked Bonnie. She started to loom up on Bonnie again, and this time Bonnie didn't wait for Matilda to back off of her own accord. Matilda yelped and then let out a series of very interesting curses as she staggered back, one hand pressed against the side of her head. Bonnie counted to five and then stopped. It was another count of ten before the black eyes and spiderwebbing veins receded from Matilda's face; she looked towards Damon.

"Yeah, it's kind of a bitch when she does that," Damon said.

"That's your reasoning?" Matilda asked Bonnie, breathing hard. "You must not think much of us, if you think that I would turn against my own kind because you can do _that_."

"She really doesn't," Damon answered for Bonnie, though he looked over Matilda's head and made eye contact with Bonnie the entire time. "The vampires in the Mystic Falls tomb escaped. So far as we can tell, they're in Miami. We thought that you would be able to put your ear to the ground and get us a little closer to the mark than that."

Matilda rubbed at the side of her head and then looked at her fingers where a few drops of blood had leaked from her ear. Her expression as she looked Bonnie over turned a lot more considering. "That's just you telling me what you want in more words," she said. "It's not a suitable motive for me putting my ass on the line with every surviving vampire in Miami when it's done. Try again."

"For my part, they hurt Stefan," Damon said, though the side of his mouth jerked like he was getting a bad taste even saying it. Matilda lifted one shoulder and then dropped it again as if she were struggling not to twitch. "Yeah, you remember him? And as for this charming young thing here, you already guessed right: she's a Bennett witch."

All of the expression dropped from Matilda's face, leaving her looking as if she had been chiseled from wood. If her stance weren't still so predatory, Bonnie would almost think that all of the life had leaked from her altogether. "It wasn't just a guess. She has their look about her."

"You knew my family?" Bonnie asked.

Matilda roamed her gaze slowly up and down Bonnie's body, but Bonnie didn't think that Matilda was really seeing her, rather than applying her form to a photograph from the past. "I might have had a run-in with a Bennett or two, back in the day," she finally said. Matilda rolled her eyes and knocked a lamp that had probably seen Prohibition off of an end table that looked even older than that; Damon flashed across the room and caught it before it could hit the ground.

"You know you just would have regretted that later," he admonished her as he set it back down in its rightful place.

"You're pushing your luck, Salvatore," Matilda told Damon in a tone so furious that she seemed beyond expressing it when the predator in her was trapped in the form of a mere human.

"Living this long isn't fun unless you put in on the line every now and again," Damon answered evenly.

"Yes or no?" Bonnie asked Matilda. Neither she nor Damon flinched when Matilda's response was to knock the lamp from the table again, and Damon didn't intervene this time. The colored pieces of glass that made up the shade looked like jewels as it shattered up against the wall and then fell back down to the carpet in shards.

"Come back in the morning," Matilda told Damon flatly. She only looked at Bonnie in sideways glances. "That'll be the very earliest that I'll be able to find anything."

Bonnie had been keeping a clear path between herself and the door the entire time. She knew that she, and Damon if she could bring him along, had an escape. Enough was still enough. "I am not sleeping here tonight," she informed Damon coolly.

"I wasn't offering," Matilda responded. For the briefest of moments, they met eyes before Bonnie turned to let herself out. The back of her neck prickled; she trusted Damon behind her to get between the two of them if Matilda attempted something. And if he didn't, there was a lot of wood in Matilda's home, to either burn or to break into stakes.

"You made quite an impression on her," Damon said as they walked to the car.

Bonnie took her keys back from him and ignored the face that he made at her. "Do you have vampire ex-girlfriends scattered all over the country or something?" she asked.

Damon hesitated long enough to make Bonnie certain that he was going to say something that would necessitate her smacking him before he folded himself into the passenger seated and responded coolly, "What makes you think that I stopped at the boundaries of the US? The whole world's a banquet."

Bonnie made the irritated noise that she was certain Damon had grown very familiar with by now and pulled them away from the curb. It didn't take long to find a place to stay for the night, and soon Bonnie was filling out the same forms in another cheap, anonymous motel. She hesitated only a second before deciding that she was going to be Elena Fell here; who knew how the owner of the previous night's room had reacted to the destroyed dresser.

"You need one room or two?" the bored-looking girl with the nose ring asked as she accepted Bonnie's assumed name without asking for ID. She pushed a few pieces of purple hair out of her eyes and looked Damon up and down in a way which communicated clearly that they would make the rest of her night if the answer was two while Damon smirked.

He leaned forward to look at the name that Bonnie had put down for tonight, making her barely hold back the urge to kick him, and started, "Elena here's so temperamental, it's probably a good idea for her to have her space--"

"Just the one," Bonnie interrupted, staring Damon down and not certain who was calling whose bluff while the clerk's face fell. After she had accepted the room key and they were walking to the door, she said, "I am amazed that more people haven't kept you on a leash."

"Fun suggestion, we'll have to keep it in mind." Damon threw a skeptical eye about their room, which contained furniture that had seen better decades and more than a few cigarette burns in the carpet, but at least housekeeping seemed to be on top of things. "Not that I'm encouraging you to lower your standards even more, but how are you paying for this little venture? Shouldn't your allowance have been gone by the end of the first day?"

"Cute. Don't forget, the younger I am, the more that makes you kind of like a pedophile." Bonnie threw her bag down beside the bed and turned, catching a glimpse of herself that she had not expected from the mirror above the dresser. She looked harder than she had before she had left Mystic Falls; she wasn't certain that she looked any older. "Grams left me some money. I can't think of a better way to spend it than taking down the things that killed her."

"What about school?" Damon was roaming about the room, touching everything in it as if he had never seen it before. It was probably a good thing that he had been born in a time before supermarkets, or he would have driven his parents nuts as a child. Bonnie hesitated, weighing the odds that Damon was actually being sincere, until he glanced back at her and waited.

"Doing this is more important than spending a few weeks in summer school and dealing with the wrath of my dad," Bonnie said shortly. She checked out the fading bruise on the side of her face in the mirror while Damon kept circling the room behind her.

"That's nicely obsessive."

"Says the guy who protected my family for nearly a century and a half on the off-chance that we wouldn't kick your ass when it came to getting your ex out of the ground." Bonnie looked up and noticed Damon watching her, an unreadable expression on his face. He had his head tilted to one side, halfway between a predator taking the measure of prey and a wolf waiting for its next cue, making Bonnie think of alphas again. She cleared her throat and went back to examining her collection of injuries. When she was busy pulling her blouse down her shoulder to make certain that she hadn't tugged a stitch loose, it was easy not to look Damon in the eye. "Did you know her? My grandmother?"

"Before the tomb? No. She impressed the hell out of Stefan, though." Damon pulled off his boots and then sprawled out across the bed, taking up as much space as he possibly could and looking not a little like a starfish in the process.

Bonnie turned around while Damon laced his hands behind his head and grinned at her. "Take your pants off," she told him as she shucked her own blouse over her head and then tossed it in the general direction of her bag. It wasn't vampire speed with which Damon obeyed her, but it was still damned close, and he didn't say a word about what she had told him that morning. Bonnie paid close attention to where his belt landed over the side of the bed while she finished removing her own clothes and then straddled him. It took three kisses before she felt him hardening against her and herself responding in turn, three long kisses where Bonnie took control of his mouth and tried her hardest to detect a hint of fang, but got nothing other than male, just a little too cool than he ought to have been. He made a soft, pleased sound when Bonnie pinned his wrists down by his sides, an annoyed one when she leaned back. Bonnie raked her nails down his chest and then splayed her fingers across his abdomen, feeling his muscles quivering and reflecting on the silence ringing through her head.

"What is it?" Damon asked her, curiously soft.

"The first time that I touched Stefan, I saw death," Bonnie said. She leaned down and kissed Damon, biting hard at his lower lip. "Every time that I've touched you for the past three days, I haven't seen anything. No past, no future, nothing." She knew the past well enough. As for the future: that was still up in the air.

"I think we need to institute a tit for tat clause," Damon muttered, running his tongue over the place where Bonnie had bitten him. When Bonnie released his wrists, he put one hand against the small of her back, guiding her. Bonnie rocked back against his erection without actually taking him inside of her yet even though she wanted to, because the face he made at her while she teased him and made him wait was better. "Am I to take it that's a bad thing?"

"It's a thing." Damon started to take her by the hips and lift her onto him when she showed no signs of doing it herself, but Bonnie stopped him by putting her hand against his chest and pushing him back down to the mattress. "Wait a minute." She left him just long enough to bend over the edge of the bed and retrieve his discarded belt. "Grab the headboard."

Damon's eyes were the blue of a frozen lake as he obeyed her, heavy-lidded. Bonnie looped the belt around his wrists several times and secured it by running one end beneath the loops, leaving his wrists bound to each other, but not to the bed itself. He still hadn't released the headboard.

"You know that it won't be anything for me to break that," Damon said, twisting his wrists a little and making the leather creak for emphasis.

"I know." Bonnie straddled him again and leaned in close, so that her hair was tickling the sides of his face and her throat was probably the most interesting thing in his entire field of vision. "But you won't, because I'm telling you not to." She finally took Damon's cock in hand and guided him into her, gasping and giving herself a minute to adjust to being filled before she started to rock, slowly for now, one hand staying on Damon's abdomen for balance and the other finding her clit when the angle wasn't just right just yet.

Damon didn't test the belt that they both knew didn't mean a damned thing to his strength and didn't let go of the headboard, either, even though the angle had to be awkward. His eyes moving every inch of Bonnie's body as she lifted, sank down, lifted and sank down showed how much he wanted to be touching her, but. She had told him not to.

"Far be it from me to turn down a pretty woman who wants to sleep with me," Damon said after a few moments, his voice gone raspy. His eyes were tinging over slightly into black when they made eye contact. "But I thought that I would have to work a little longer on you before you would be willing to switch gears from hate into hate-sex, even with tequila."

Bonnie slowed and put both of her hands against Damon's torso, feeling the lines of his muscles, the dips where his hips began. His hands were loose, relaxed, until Bonnie dug her nails in just a little, and then they became fists.

"I haven't been in control of anything in my life for over six months now," Bonnie said. "Do you have any idea what that's like?"

Damon stared at her hard until Bonnie started to move again. He closed his eyes and pushed his head back against the pillows when Bonnie returned to tracing patterns against his skin with her nails, just this side of rough. "More than you know," he said. "Being in control all the time gets pretty fucking old, though, too." Said the man with his wrists bound above his head.

"Could have guessed that. I'll just make up for lost time and let you know when the moment comes." Bonnie kept Damon's hands on the headboard and fucked herself on him until she was close, and then grabbed for him. She came hard when Damon's finger on her clit and the feel of the leather belt brushing against her thighs, and when Damon himself reached orgasm shortly afterwards, he was watching her with eyes that were pure black.

End Part Six


	7. Chapter 7

Part Seven

Bonnie took twice her normal time in the shower the next morning, in no small part because Damon joined her and then took great delight in coming as close as he could to breaking every direction that she gave him without actually crossing the line in disobedience. By the time she stepped out, there was a darkening line of love bites running down her breasts and across her belly, making it clear where Damon's eventual destination had been the entire time. They had made Bonnie feel even less sorry for how hard she had jerked his hair when he had gotten there than she might have otherwise.

Morning sunlight was falling across Matilda's porch when they arrived at her house, and she swung the door open while staying well behind the protective wood at their knock. "Creepy," Bonnie muttered under her breath without caring that Matilda's ears were certainly good enough to catch it. Girls not smart enough to turn right around and head straight back down the steps tended not to fare well in the kinds of horror movies that Matilda's house evoked, even though Damon with his hand once again in the small of Bonnie's back was a lot more formidable than a horny high school guy.

Matilda had cleared away the broken lamp at some point during the night, though Bonnie noticed that a few other trinkets appeared to have suffered as casualties after they had gone. She folded her arms over her chest as Matilda shut the door behind them and asked, "So, where are we on this?"

Matilda tugged at her sleeves and looked as if she wouldn't mind breaking a few more of her things, now that they were right down to it. "I wasn't able to get anything last night," she said. Bonnie made an impatient huffing noise, and Matilda snapped back, "What do you propose I do _right now_?" She pointed towards a golden ray of sunlight that was managing to crawl its way around the edges of her heavy living room curtains and trace patterns along the wallpaper. "That's daylight out there, sweetheart, and not all of us have magic rings."

Bonnie took a deep breath and tried not to notice the way that Matilda would scrutinize Bonnie's face when she thought that Bonnie could not notice, as if she were searching for something there. "I'm sorry," she said finally, even thought it made her a little sick to do so. "I know that you're doing us a really big favor here. And, for the record, we just want info, I'm not going to ask you to attack your own kind." She would have thought that that would make things _better_ , but Matilda drew back and looked Bonnie up and down all over again as if she was seeing someone or something else there.

"Bonnie, most of us have no problem whatsoever attacking our own kind," Damon said easily, back in his previous perch on the arm of Matilda's couch. The rogue beam of sunlight was falling over his hand, his ring.

"You mean, _you_ have never had any problem whatsoever attacking your own kind," Matilda corrected. "It always bothered the hell out of me." Bonnie, surprised, flinched before she could stop herself.

Damon shrugged. "Semantics."

Bonnie wondered if she was going to need to call them back to attention as she would school children. "Regardless," she went on forcefully. "That's not what we're asking you to do. We just need information. Access. There are--" _Grams, I'm sorry,_ Bonnie thought without quite being able to pin down why. She had started this in order to avenge Grams, hadn't she? Weren't all the lines that she had to cross on the way all right? She didn't look towards Damon, the line that she hadn't had to cross three times and counting, as she went on, "There are only a few vampires in this city that I'm interested in. Just point me in the right direction."

Still looking dubious, Matilda said, "I'm working on a few things, but they haven't borne fruit quite yet."

Bonnie was debating whether or not to trust her and was wondering whether a quick convo with Damon on the subject of just where the hell he had met this woman would not be in order when his cellular phone began to buzz. "It's Elena," he said after glancing at the screen, and rose gracefully from his perch and exited the room before he answered. Bonnie was left alone with a vampire, but she didn't feel particularly nervous.

Matilda watched Damon go and said, "You must not be the jealous type. That's weird, because Damon always liked the jealous type."

Not afraid of being unable to defend herself from physical attack, but more and more unsettled by the moment with the way that Matilda continued to look at her, Bonnie said, "It's not like that."

She had to give it to her, Matilda had a pretty impressive eye-roll when she threw her weight behind it. "Please." She snorted. "I can smell you all over Damon, and your scent is--muted. Vampires don't really smell like anything, you know. Not even death."

Bonnie might have considered that if Damon could hear her blood rushing and her stomach gurgling so easily that he knew when she was hungry almost before she did, that another vampire would be able to tell that their business arrangement had extended to an after-hours arrangement as well. She rocked her weight from one foot to the other and refused to let herself be intimidated even though she could feel blood rising into her face. "It's not like that," Bonnie repeated. "I don't _own_ Damon. We laid down a few ground rules, but other than that he can do whatever he wants."

"Funny." Matilda eyed Bonnie up and down. "Then maybe you're not as much his type as I thought. Little secret, by which I mean half the world knows it? He kind of likes being owned."

The last part was said from a place much deeper into Bonnie's personal space than she could remember inviting Matilda, and without vampire speed getting her there, too. Bonnie refused to step back. "If you're trying to make a point," she said in a low, quiet voice that made Matilda blink, "then you might want to rethink. I don't really care who's been in Damon's bed before me."

Matilda blinked a few more times and rocked back as if she were genuinely startled. "Oh," she said, and tilted her head to the side. "No, no, sweetheart. It's not Damon's bed that I've been in before at all."

Not the first time that Matilda had had a run-in with a Bennett. Bonnie went very still and could feel her face growing cold, but Damon walked back into the room before she could say anything. He paused in the doorway and took each of them in in turn before he moved on to the whole picture, eyes sharp, and for a second or two Bonnie actually thought that he was going to ask her if she was okay. She shook her head at him slightly, not certain herself if she was telling him that, no, she wasn't, or that, no, this was not the time to ask. "What did Elena have to say?"

Damon shrugged, though the airy gesture did nothing to mask how closely he was watching them both. "Oh, the usual. Wanted to make certain that I wasn't corrupting you with my wicked ways, all of that." He grinned at her. "If only she knew that it was mutual."

Matilda rolled her eyes so that Bonnie didn't have to. "I need to feed," she announced without preamble. Bonnie's nerves were already on a war-zone trigger from the past few days and the innuendo-wrapped bombshell that Matilda had already laid down in front of her; she could feel the air in the room growing warmer before she was even aware of what she was doing. Matilda paused in mid-step, mildly concerned but not the tiniest bit surprised, though Damon took a protective step back towards the staircase.

"I going for the finest vintage that my fridge has to offer, actually," Matilda said. She waited until Bonnie had allowed the air to cool back down to a normal temperature before she continued on her way. Back over her shoulder, she said, "Though, as much as you might find it distasteful, there are more than a few humans who don't mind being bled. Some even find it erotic."

It was too dark in this house, and the antique furniture, no matter how well-kept, was nothing to Bonnie but a reminder of how old its owner actually was. She turned towards the front door. "I need to eat, too." Even though her stomach was roiling, she couldn't remember the last time that she had put something in it, and that way led to sloppy thinking and unpredictable magic, one of which she was already seeing way too much of in herself.

Damon glided up behind her, the return of his hand in the small of her back the only warning that he was there. Bonnie tightened her hand against the doorknob and took several deep breaths until she could force her fingers to release. "It's fine," she said, even though Damon had not asked. If only she could pick up Spanish this fast, Mrs. Ramirez would be amazed. "You should feed, too. You, ah, don't really hit me as the type who handles low blood sugar well." She was nearly babbling, her heartbeat only slightly slower than it had been when Damon had tried to take Emily's necklace away from her and they had both felt the charge of power before it had burned him. Damon put his fingers lightly under her chin and looked at her hard, but nodded and slipped away after Matilda without another sound. Bonnie didn't know whether she ought to be grateful or not.

The sunlight was a welcome antidote when Bonnie slid behind the wheel of her car again, though the smell of citrus was so overpowering until she exited the neighborhood that her shy appetite dove even deeper out of sight. She drove until exhaust and the barest hint of salt replaced it, found a place that could have been The Grill with a more aged facade and a sign advertising that it was open twenty-four hours a day, including breakfast. The first thing that she ordered was the strongest coffee that they offered, as she felt more than a little like she had just been punched in the head and didn't like it in the slightest.

It had been long enough; it had been too long. Bonnie took out the prepaid cell phone and hit in Elena's number, putting her head into her free hand as she did so.

Elena answered on the very first ring, just as Bonnie's father had done, as if she had been waiting for the call. "Hello?"

"Elena?"

"Oh, my _God_!" Elena nearly yelled. There was a muffled sound that Bonnie thought might be Elena actually clapping her hand over her mouth, and she wondered who else was there with her. "Caroline is telling everyone that you ran off to Atlantic City to get married--" Bonnie was going to kill Caroline. "With some guy that she had never seen before--" Scratch that, Bonnie was going to _kiss_ Caroline. "Do you know how worried everyone is about you?" And under the fading fear and obvious relief, yeah, there was a little hurt there. Bonnie didn't think that it would help to tell Elena that she hadn't called Caroline, either, since Caroline had known that Bonnie was leaving in the first place.

Bonnie shrugged a little guiltily before she realized that Elena couldn't see her. "It's fine, between me and Damon we can handle just about anything."

"Wait, _Damon_ is with you?" Elena pulled away from the phone. Bonnie could dimly hear her relating the news to someone else, a masculine rumble responding. Stefan, most likely.

"Weren't you talking to him just awhile ago?"

"Yeah, he said that he had left town to clear his head--" Bonnie tilted her own head to the side and wondered in what possible universe Damon could ever do soul-searching and it be believable. "I know, I know, I figured he had run off to cause mayhem or get laid or something." Bonnie made an abrupt, mortified sound and dropped her head into her hand again. Elena paused. "Are you all right?"

"I really, really, really have no idea," Bonnie confessed, meaning it. She pointed at something on the menu blindly as the waitress came by for her order.

"Bonnie." Elena's voice was soft and scared. "What's going on, has Damon done anything to you?" Stefan said something else in the background, and Elena answered, "I know, I know, but still."

"No. If anything, I think that I'm in charge of this shindig, which is kind of scary--" _I'm watching living things burn to death and making pacts with vampires, never mind sleeping with one._ "I'm going after the vampires from the tomb, and Damon's helping me."

"What?" Elena didn't try to contain her yell this time. "Bonnie, are you _serious?_ You could get killed, or hurt--"

"Elena, I'm fine," Bonnie said firmly. She rolled her sore shoulder and tried to keep the wince out of her voice. "It's something that I need to do."

"Where are you?"

"Are you going to send Stefan down here to save me from myself?"

"I _might_ ," Elena said. "Or I might come down there and do it myself. Bonnie, seriously. What are you thinking?"

"That my grandmother died to close that tomb," Bonnie said flatly. "And if I can't bring her back, then the very least that I can do is finish the job."

Elena was quiet on the other side for a long beat, clearly at a loss for how she should be responding when the reason that Grams had broken the seal in the first place was her boyfriend, before she finally said, "I am so going to kill Damon for not telling me that you've been with him this entire time."

"Only if you can fly, I'm closer to him than you are." Bonnie leaned back as the waitress came back with her plate and was pleased to discover that she had ordered nothing more dangerous than pancakes. "Elena, there's something else that I need to tell you." Bonnie carefully smashed her pat of butter with the fork until it was a golden-yellow mess and she could delay no longer. "When you said that you figured Damon was off causing mayhem and getting laid, well...that's maybe not so far off from what he's actually doing with me, except that I made him promise to direct the mayhem towards vampires only until we're back in Mystic Falls."

Elena didn't speak for so very long that Bonnie thought that they had been disconnected, or worse, that Elena was so disgusted with her that she didn't know what to say. Coming from Damon's biggest champion outside of his brother, that was saying a lot. "Okay," Elena finally said slowly. "I don't...is he compelling you?" Stefan said something, and Elena answered, "In a minute. I don't know, she's Bonnie, she might be able to tell."

Bonnie felt herself smile a little, warmed by the faith in her. "He's not compelling me," she said. "That was the other rule. No killing humans, and no compulsion. He says that he's a man of his word."

Stefan said something else. Elena answered, "It's kinda creepy how you're not even trying to hide that." Back to Bonnie, she said, "In case you couldn't figure it out, Stefan's close enough to hear everything that you're saying to me."

"Rude." The pancakes had come with pineapple sauce better suited to the top of a sundae. Bonnie swished them around before she speared one on the end of her fork and held it up, comparing the color to the bright sun outside. She wanted to stay around gleaming things for as long as she could before she had to go back into shadow.

"Well, you have us kind of rattled here." Elena said something that Bonnie didn't quite catch. "Okay, he's leaving the room. Are you okay, Bonnie? Really? I mean, I know I asked that, and you said that you didn't know, but..."

"I really don't," Bonnie answered. "I'm just--" She felt her voice tremble the tiniest bit, and it was worse that she wasn't doing it because she was sad. "I'm angry _all the time_ , Elena. And when I'm not angry, I'm scared, because this is some fucked-up shit that I'm doing here. I guess Damon just knows from fucked-up shit, and is a lot harder to hurt than Joe Normal if I slip."

"What do you mean by that?" Elena asked, sounding guarded.

"I need to talk to Stefan," Bonnie said. "Um, alone."

Elena hesitated, and then said, "Sure, hang on." There was a series of rustling noises, a quick exchange between muted voices, and then Stefan came on, saying, "Hello?"

"If we both make it through this conversation alive, we're going to be very lucky," Bonnie informed him solemnly. "I just want to let you know what you're getting into before you commit."

"I'll...keep that in mind. Are you certain that you're all right, Bonnie?" Stefan sounded genuinely concerned for her. Bonnie tried to focus instead on the way that he had looked on the night of the pageants, the skin around his eyes so laced-over with veins that he had looked as if he were wearing a mask and eyes that were black rocks without the slightest hint of humanity left in them.

"I'm fine," Bonnie said. "I can handle myself. If necessary, I can handle Damon, too. That's kind of what this is about." She took a deep breath and blurted, "Stefan, have you ever noticed that your brother kind of, um, likes women who push him around?"

"Oh." Had they been standing face to face, Bonnie was fairly certain that she would have been able to answer the question of whether vampires still had sufficient blood pressure to blush. "And I'm guessing that you're not asking for this in an academic way."

"Academia was about two days ago." Bonnie struggled against the urge to hide behind her hair as the waitress refilled her coffee cup. "So. Does he?"

Stefan sounded as if he were weighing his words very, very carefully and was a little perturbed that he could not also find a place to hide as he said, "Katherine...kind of did a number on Damon."

"You are underselling that in so many ways," Bonnie said.

"Yeah, well. The point being that she...woke something up in him that he liked a lot, and he has been looking for her, literally and figuratively, ever since. Look, if he's manipulating you into something--"

"He's not," Bonnie answered firmly. "Whatever we're doing, we're definitely doing it because we both want to." She entertained only briefly the idea of whether it would be better at the end of the day to say that Damon had tricked or coerced her into this little dance, and dismissed it a second later. If nothing else, she could say that she had walked in with eyes wide open.

"Damon is very good at manipulating people," Stefan said, but he still sounded worried, and Bonnie didn't think that it was entirely for her. "So much so that you don't realize what he's doing until it's over."

"He's still kind of a rat bastard, got it." Bonnie took a deep breath and gave herself a note of congratulations for working through a conversation about Damon's sexuality with his freaking brother, but there was still one more thing that she needed to say. "Stefan? For the record, just in case--just in case, you should know that I couldn't think of a single thing that was going to convince Damon to do this, the vampire hunting thing, with me until I pointed out that he was going to be taking out the same vampires that hurt you."

"Oh." It was a different kind of surprised this time, pleased but trying to hide it in case it should turn sour. The language of Stefan didn't have quite as many modifiers as the language of Damon. "Thank you for telling me that."

"We both deserve to deal with him with eyes wide open," Bonnie answered. "Can I talk to Elena again? Alone?"

"Sure." There was the sound of a phone changing hands before Elena was back on the line and going, "Call it third time's the charm, but, really. You would tell me if there was something that I could do, right?" She sounded so unsure of herself, and Bonnie hesitated so long in her answer, that it was like a canyon opening up between them even though they were nowhere near each other.

"I'm scared, Elena," Bonnie finally blurted. "I mean, I'm not scared of the vampires anymore. I really am powerful enough to take them on. But I'm scared that I might not like myself when I'm done, and I'm scared that if Damon really is messed up over Katherine and not just a little different in the way that I'm kind of figuring out that I'm a little different and that if I keep just being _mad_ like this I could wind up hurting him for reasons that have nothing to do with what he's actually _done_. I've watched...I've set a vampire on fire and watching him burn. I told myself that I was doing it because I needed to face it if I was going to do it, but I kind of liked watching it, too. I'm scared that I might not be a good person when I do make it home."

Elena was quiet for so long that Bonnie was afraid that she had either lost the connection or worse, that Elena was so disgusted that she couldn't respond, before she finally said, "Bonnie? Even if the rest of this is weird and new, there is one thing I'm sure of: you are a good person, you are always going to be a good person, and whatever is trying to make you not a good person has no idea what it's messing with."

Bonnie laughed a little even though it sounded strange, and put her hand over her mouth. "The thing might be me," she answered, but went on, "Okay. Message received. We'll talk again soon?"

"Bonnie Bennett, the next time that I talk to you, we're doing it face to face."

The laugh came out better the second time around. "Make it a date," Bonnie said before she hung up the phone.

End Part Seven


	8. Chapter 8

Part Eight

"Your porch is about to fall in completely, you know," Bonnie said as Matilda swung the door open to let her in upon her return. The sun was nearly at its midpoint in the sky; Bonnie had driven around until she had run her tank nearly dry before filling it again and coming back. Her head wasn't that much clearer than it had been when she left.

Matilda eyed the place where the sunlight took control again at the edges of her railing as she stepped to the side. "The worse this place looks like from the outside, the less people want to actually come inside and bother me." She shrugged and shut the door behind Bonnie, closing the reality off from the appearance. "I've been doing this a long time, I know how to walk the line between discouraging door-to-door salesmen and getting the whole place condemned."

"Clever." Bonnie caught Damon leaning up against the stairway bannister, scrolling through a message on his phone. Somehow, she had a feeling that he was being read the riot act, and probably not by the person he was related to.

"Not all of us have boarding houses and a deep-seated compulsion to drift in and out of the same small town until someone is bound to remember us again," Matilda said sweetly. She didn't bat a lash when Damon flashed her his middle finger. "I'm much safer, and my life much less complicated, if I don't attract the attention of humans at all." Bonnie stared at her hard, trying to pick up on any subtexts in what she was saying and how it related to the innuendo-laden pile of dirty laundry that Matilda had dumped at her feet before, but then Damon was sauntering down the stairs, eyes sharp on her no matter how hard he tried to play nonchalance.

"What did Stefan say?" Damon asked.

"Maybe I just talked to Elena," Bonnie said, lifting her shoulders and not trying to deny that she had spoken to at least one of them.

"After everything that went down right before I left, they'll be using each other as mutual security blankets until Elena has to go to college and someone finally figures out that that nice Salvatore boy doesn't look quite right," Damon said dismissively. His little hand-wave didn't disguise the fact that he was still watching Bonnie, waiting for her answer.

"Stefan told me to tell you that you're a pervert," Bonnie answered, and got Damon's real laugh before he was able to smother it.

"He's been calling me a pervert since well before the two of us were turned, that's hardly more than 'hello.'" Damon frowned at his phone and muttered, "They're going to start looking like each other soon," leading Bonnie to believe that Stefan was not the only one calling him a pervert.

"He told me to be careful that you weren't manipulating me."

"Oh." Damon circled around, caught Bonnie with nowhere to go but further back up against the stairwell and smiled faintly when she stood her ground. "Did he read you the whole speech about how I'm mad, bad, and dangerous to know? He wrote that one out years ago, keeps a copy in his pocket."

Bonnie had Damon spun around and pinned against the staircase before she had time to think about it without laying a hand on him, though that found itself resting against first his jaw, then the side of his throat, a second or two later. When her thumb stroked lightly against the line of his jaw, she was not certain which of them was more surprised. "He was worried, too, though he didn't say it. That I might hurt you."

Damon's pupils dilated slightly as he turned his head to kiss the side of Bonnie's thumb. "I thought that you had a whole deal about not doing that unless I ask very, very nicely."

"I don't want any stains on this rug," Matilda interrupted. "Of any kind. It's turn of the century, you can't replace that." Damon tested Bonnie's hold on him by putting his hand against her wrist, curving his fingers against her pulse point, for the briefest of seconds before she released him and stepped away. Matilda, meanwhile, was pacing back and forth across the rug that she claimed not to want to see destroyed, arms folded over her chest and a deep frown line driven between her brows. "I don't hunt often," she said. "So my ties into the vampire culture around here don't run that deep. I was only able to find out two things."

Judging by Matilda's body language, at least one of them wasn't happy. Bonnie asked, "And they are?"

"The first is that there's a group of about fifteen or so vampires who come together every summer and agree to play nicely with the other children for the duration of the summer tourist season. They have a controlling interest in a nightclub called Cameo down near the beach where there are a lot of drunk girls who can be compelled to forget, if they get to come home at all."

"Nice," Bonnie blurted, forgetting for the moment that she was standing beside someone who probably would have leapt at the chance to join the party a few months or weeks before. She wasn't certain whether she was referring to Matilda or to Damon, only because she wasn't certain when it was that Matilda had stopped hunting or if she could be believed when she said that she had stopped at all.

Matilda made an impatient flicking gesture and otherwise didn't acknowledge that Bonnie had spoken at all before she was going on. "You two go have your fun, and good for you if you survive it. The second thing is this: I don't know who you've killed or how discreet you were while you were doing it, but someone knows that you were headed this way and has put out the word. I have not lived this long by jumping into stupid fights that I know I can't win, so that's it. I want the two of you out of here and not coming back. I don't care if she's a Bennett."

Bonnie shifted her weight from one foot to the other, wondering why she had somehow expected that Matilda would help them more than that, and why she somehow knew that it wasn't the power of the Bennett witches that Matilda was referring to. "Fine," she said grudgingly. "We'll respect your wishes." Damon was already turning towards the door, losing interest now that Matilda wasn't showing that she could be any further use to them, while Bonnie hesitated. "Who was it?" she blurted. Matilda looked her over. "The Bennett that you were involved with. Who was she?" God _damnit_ , she couldn't stop herself from asking even if she wasn't certain that she wanted to know. "Her name wasn't Sheila, was it?"

Matilda looked as briefly startled for a moment as if Bonnie had hauled off and smacked her before she began shaking her head. "Sheila Bennett, with a vampire? She'd kill herself first." Bonnie felt vaguely sick, and didn't look Damon's way. "Her mother." Matilda's voice and face grew soft in the same way that Elena's did when she talked about Stefan. Bonnie wasn't even sure that she and Damon should still be here while Matilda was retreating back into what were obviously very private memories, and she couldn't believe that she was respecting the emotions of a vampire enough to care. "Her name was June, and she was the loveliest woman that I had ever seen when we met. She was--we remained friends until the day that she died. Sheila didn't take to that too terribly well. I suspect that that's why she hated vampires so much, me and June. You have eyes a great deal like hers, the same way of carrying yourself."

"Oh," Bonnie said, knowing that her voice and posture were both stiff and not particularly caring. She turned to Damon, whose face was carefully guarded and blank in the way that he got when there were things happening behind his eyes that he wanted no one else to see. "Did you know that was why she would help us?"

Damon's face barely moved as he answered, "Witches and vampires are found in close proximity to each other a lot. I knew that they had known each other. And...you might not be an exact match the way that Elena is to Katherine, but people do stupid things all the time when they want to hang onto the past."

Bonnie thought long and hard about whether it would be worth it break their deal before she turned back to Matilda and said, very carefully, "Thank you for getting us this far. We won't bother you anymore." She turned and walked out the front door without waiting to see if Damon would follow. She no longer had to wonder what Grams would think of what Bonnie was doing with Damon, and maybe even what she would think of Bonnie for doing it.

Bonnie felt cold even in the warm sunlight as she and Damon walked across the lawn and to her car together. She felt his hand starting to slide into her pocket to retrieve her keys and grabbed his wrist hard enough to hurt a human. The warning knell rolled out of her before she could stop herself; that wasn't good. "I'm fine."

"Right. You look fine," Damon said with his fingers pressed lightly against his temple and his eyes seeing much too much. He crossed around to the passenger side and then folded his arms together on the hood so that he could still address her. "Granted, you're a lot more likely to be killed by a crash than I am, but it still wouldn't be the bestest-best moment of my day, all right?"

Bonnie answered by hurling her door open and then slamming herself down into the driver's seat so hard that she nearly ruined it all by smacking her head against the frame. "I'm _fine_ ," she snapped again, shoving the key into the ignition.

Damon folded himself down into the passenger seat more slowly, putting on his seatbelt. "Of course you are," he answered smoothly. While there were certain times when Bonnie could admit that his little verbal games could be amusing and even that they gave her an outlet for her irritation so that she _didn't_ go into that scary place that Elena was so convinced she would never be able to reach (and Bonnie really did not like the hint that she had just gotten from herself about which one of them was right), it had officially become _not_ one of those times from the very second that Matilda had let them know that Bonnie was not the first among her family to lay down with a wolf, and that Grams would be absolutely disgusted by it. She jerked away from the curb so hard that she nearly sideswiped a Volvo in the process and held up a finger at Damon in warning to keep his smart comments to himself for once in his life.

She might have known that there was very little on this earth capable of making Damon Salvatore actually shut his mouth. He sank down low in his seat and braced his knee up against the dash like he had the first time that they had ridden together, all but lacing his hands behind his head. If he actually licked his lips, Bonnie swore that she was going to open the passenger door with her mind and bodily shove him out. Maybe she could still get some credit with Grams on the basis of better late than never.

"You're looking at this the wrong way," Damon said. "You're really just following in a family tradition, once you think about it. What's so awful about tradition?"

"Damon?" Bonnie asked in a voice savage enough that, nope, that settled it, Elena was wrong, wrong, wrong, and Bonnie just hoped that this didn't go far enough that she ever found out how much. "This is not a talking time." Damon shut his mouth so quickly that it was nearly comical, and Bonnie sighed, putting one hand briefly over her eyes. She didn't drop it again until Damon reached out and jerked hard on the wheel, and then she realized that she had taken them within a foot of slamming into the back of a pickup truck manufactured during the days when had been built like tanks rather than out of fiberglass.

"I'm just saying," Damon said in response to Bonnie's look. "One of has to be at the helm of this ship, and I think that we both know that I'm not the responsible type."

 _That doesn't mean that I have to fuck you_ came directly on the heels of _But I thought that she was doing it all because it was **right**_. Bonnie sighed again, and only felt the ache behind her eyes tightening as she pulled into the lot of the motel. Having one room might have turned out to be a benefit when it came to easy access to her smart-mouthed mistake, but it was a real bitch when she mostly wanted to storm around, break some stuff, and cry. It also didn't help when the door was barely closed behind them before Damon was taking her by the waist and turning her towards him. Bonnie put her hands against his forearms and he stilled immediately, but did not let her go. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt in defiance of the Miami heat, but he still felt cool underneath it. She might not be getting visions of death when she touched him, but it was still impossible to forget what he was, what she was by laying with him. Bonnie shoved him away without noticing at first that she was shoving him towards the bed until he sank down on the edge with a grace that was nearly feline, wolf comparisons or not.

"I would ask if it was talking time now, but I think that I know exactly what answer I would get," Damon said smoothly, leaning back onto his elbows. There was no other way to read him than as an invitation when he was like that; since she wasn't even tempted, maybe there was hope for her yet.

Sometimes she thought that he said and did the things that he did because he was actively looking for someone who would enjoy smacking him around. Bonnie kept pacing back and forth in front of the dresser and held up a hand of warning towards him instead, hoping to get back some of the points that she had lost in front of Matilda's house by not giving him what he wanted now. Especially not when she wasn't certain of her ability to do it without losing control. Even if Damon had a hell of a lot coming to him from all of his years on the earth...not like that. "Not a good plan, Damon," she said, and gestured up and down the length of his body when he assumed an over the top innocent expression. "No. You know exactly what I'm talking about. All of that. Trust me, not right now, even if I was in the mood. It ever comes down to you versus me in a serious way, it's going to be because you actually did something, not because I'm pissed off and I could." Bonnie stopped and put her hands over her face. "Oh, my God, the fact that I even have to _say_ that."

"I'm more amazed that you and Stefan aren't the ones having pillow fights when you talk like that, let alone you and Elena," Damon said. He sounded almost bored, which was Bonnie's cue to peek through her fingers and see that he was watching every move she made. His body language was tight, displeased even though he didn't want her to see it, making Bonnie wonder what exactly it was that he _did_ want that she was refusing to give him. Somehow, she doubted that anyone looking like Damon Salvatore had to work hard to find people willing to tie him to a bed and fuck him silly.

Bonnie ignored Damon for the moment and thought back to the pictures that she had seen of her great-grandmother, a tall woman who had had eyes large and green enough that they stood out even in a black-and-white photograph. Matilda hadn't said that her great-grandmother had actually been unfaithful to her great-grandfather while they had been married, but she hadn't ruled it out, either; Bonnie tried to be upset about the woman in the photographs, but mostly she couldn't help but think that she knew exactly what it felt like to sit where she had when the picture had been taken.

Damon was very, very still in his place on the mattress, and Bonnie thought that she might even have hurt his feelings by not paying sufficient attention to him, which was just proof that she was so far gone that there was no hope of her ever coming back. Finally, he sighed and raised his eyes towards the ceiling, leaning further back onto his elbows against the bed. On a human, baring his throat like that would have been a mark of vulnerability, but on Damon it only made his skin look even more pale and the whole package more like a statue than a man. "Sometimes I forget how young you are," he said.

Bonnie stopped pacing long enough to spin towards him and snap, "You're not going to make me angry enough to fuck you!" She didn't realize how loud she had been until someone in the next room over turned their television up, and then she pressed her fingers against her eyes until colors flashed across the insides of the lids. She wondered if Damon could feel how much the room was vibrating or if it was just something within her, magic aching to get out. "Can we just go kill something now?"

Damon was pure grace and temptation in motion as he rolled off of the bed. "Finally, the lady asks for something that I can do."

End Part Eight


	9. Chapter 9

Part Nine

"I don't guess that you have a dress and heels anywhere in your fourteen bags," Damon had said, while Bonnie had been getting ready to check out this Cameo place that Matilda was pointing them towards and cursing the fact that being a girl meant she had to spend so much more time on the physical details. He had still been and irritable for reasons that Bonnie could not pin down and hadn't particularly cared to. _Kind of too busy handling my own issues to take on yours, too, Salvatore._ Her hand had been shaking slightly with...something, as she had applied eyeliner and pinned up her hair.

Bonnie had made a face at him and then leaned over to produce a red dress and a pair of heels that she could probably even run in without absolutely killing herself, if it came right down to it. She had sworn that Damon was doing all that he could to keep his jaw from dropping.

"Please tell me that you did that just to fuck with me," he had said.

"Shut up," Bonnie had answered. "I basically just dumped my dresser drawers out and went. And it's three bags, so whatever."

"But you didn't think to bring _stakes_ ," Damon had said slowly.

"Did I get to the part where you need to shut up?" Bonnie had snapped back, just enough edge to her voice that Damon had actually done it. Oh, yeah, she could just see this night ending well.

Three hours later, Bonnie was smelling salt through the open window and clenching her fingers so tightly around the steering wheel that she was going to have to crack her knuckles when she finally let go. Damon had his knee up against the dashboard again, fingers laced together against his midsection, but there was no mistaking the posture for one of relaxation this time. Bonnie thought that he might leap out the passenger window if for no other reason than to do something with all of his restless energy, and he wasn't the one who was wearing a dress designed to do extremely flattering things to her chest at the same time that she was mentally preparing herself to go to war.

 _Are you going to be able to control it, or is it going to control you?_ Bonnie asked herself, and was unsettled even further when no answer came back. She shifted about in her seat, and Damon, apparently mistaking the gesture for nervousness, took his knee down from the dashboard. "Having second thoughts?" he asked her.

"No," Bonnie answered, maybe just a shade too quickly. "You?"

Damon's smile was tight and meant mostly to show teeth. "I'm not good at second-guessing, period," he said as she guided the Prius into a darkened parking garage. It was full dark out, though not quite late enough for the Miami nightlife to get started in earnest.

Through the cement pillars of the garage, Bonnie could vaguely see the club's neon and silver sign flashing across the street and the line that was already starting to stretch from the entrance. Everyone waiting in there had one thing in common, and that was that they were staggeringly beautiful. Bonnie pulled her dress a little higher up on her chest and touched at the hair that she had put up. Damon had given her appearance an approving once-over when she was done getting ready and had told her that she showed much more neck that way, and that had been nearly enough to make her take it right back down again.

"Vampires who were locked away for one hundred and fifty years with nothing better to do than hold staring contests with each other are able to adapt to the modern world enough to blend in with _that_?" Bonnie asked. She wondered how many of the women in particular standing outside of the club she would have to add together before she amassed clothing and accessories worth more than her car. Probably not nearly as many as she thought, and the red dress that seemed very impressive when she had been picking it out at the mall didn't quite compare.

"Very few of the vampires who went into the tomb were rookies," Damon answered. He leaned across her to get a better look at the line across the street himself, putting his arm against her shoulder in the process. Bonnie wasn't going to believe him for a second if he tried to protest that it was for balance, but even in her current mood the contact still settled her more than it threw her off her game. For better or worse, she was probably more of a mind with Damon Salvatore right now than she was any other creature walking the planet. "For some of them, the musket was a revolutionary invention. They know how to adapt quickly and blend." He leaned back and absently pushed a piece of Bonnie's hair that had fallen down back into place as he did so. "You're not scared."

"Not of this," Bonnie said, and knew Damon well enough by now that she could mimic his eye-roll right along with him. She weighed the pros and cons of having an actual bonding moment and went on. "Believe it or not, I don't like feeling like I could pull someone's head off for no reason at all all the time, and I've already done enough that my grandmother would be ashamed of."

"Sometimes I forget that witches really are still just humans under all of that," Damon said under his breath, just loud enough for Bonnie to hear. He held his hands up when she glared at him. "I'm not worried about the tomb vampires blending in nearly as much as I am the fact that it's a nightclub in the first place."

"Why?" Bonnie asked, and Damon leaned over her again so that he could point out the driver's window.

"Look at that crowd," he said. "And it's not even ten o' clock. They won't make it through the night without hitting capacity." Bonnie stared at him, not comprehending, but Damon didn't seem exasperated when he had to explain further. "You stand a human and a vampire side by side and I'll be able to pick out the vampire every time. We don't have a heartbeat, and we smell different, more muted. But when you're one vampire around a whole bunch of humans, the heartbeats, the smells, they really just become white noise. You don't notice any more unless someone is bleeding."

"So if the place is filled with humans to begin with..." Bonnie finished, getting it.

"Even if it's a favorite hunting ground, I'm going to have some trouble figuring out who's a vampire and who isn't unless they're right on top of me just because there's going to be so much information that I won't be able to sort it. I'll have to try to find the tomb vampires by sight, which doesn't put me at a much bigger advantage than you." Damon paused. "Are you scared yet?" Bonnie answered by way of an arched eyebrow. "I really should have figured out sooner how much you're my kind of girl." They got out of the car. Damon offered Bonnie his arm, but this wasn't an absent gesture the way that he had tended to put his hand into the small of her back a few days before. Bonnie hesitated a second before she took it and allowed him to lead her out of the parking garage and across the street. It was warm enough that she still felt a few beads of sweat prickling out against her hairline even though she wasn't heavily dressed. Damon dipped his head to murmur against her ear as they walked.

"If they're are a lot of vampires in there and they get close enough to tell that you're human, it'll be easier and safer if they think that you're compelled. I assume that you know to fake it?"

"I remember how Caroline was acting while you had her," Bonnie said, a little sharply. Damon didn't look particularly penitent before he continued.

"Then you also know that it'll be more convincing if you have a mark somewhere on you that a vampire would notice but a human could miss or buy an explanation for."

"Damon." Bonnie leaned further onto Damon's arm like they were a real, normal couple and gave him her most dazzling smile as they joined the end of a line that was moving fairly quickly, all things considered. Bonnie dearly hoped that it didn't mean that the humans were being separated into menu items just as soon as they walked through the door. "If you try to bite me, then I swear to God I will pull your fangs out of your mouth without laying a single hand on you."

"At least I can't fault you for sending me mixed signals," Damon murmured without appearing offended. He was already looking ahead, getting that focused hunter's expression Bonnie was coming to recognize in the span of a heartbeat. She followed Damon's gaze to the bouncer and got a bad feeling; Bonnie squeezed at Damon's arm in question and saw him shake his head very slightly. Oh, no. He wasn't looking at the bouncer after all, but to a half-visible figure standing just inside the door. Well, fuck.

Bonnie disentangled herself from Damon's arm just long enough to drag her dress down a hair, so that the tiniest dark edge of one of the bruises that Damon had put onto her that morning was visible. In a shadowed enough atmosphere, it would be impossible for human eyes to pick it out. "That's the best that you're getting," she whispered.

One corner of Damon's mouth crooked even though he did the gentlemanly thing and didn't look. Several people ahead, a pair of rangy blondes were turned away, sulking. "The bouncer's human," Damon murmured to her, "and actually doing his job. It'll be easier to just compel him--"

"Absolutely not," Bonnie interrupted in a voice loud enough to make Damon jerk his arm hard against hers in warning. She made sure to lower it before she went on, but still said, "What did I say about no compulsion? I know a spell that my cousin taught me, it'll cast an illusion over my ID for a few seconds."

"I had been wondering if you had gotten into that bar based solely on your charm," Damon murmured. Bonnie looked at him. "Well, you're charming to _me_ , but I thought that we had already roundly established that I'm a pervert. For someone who seems to pride themselves on their sense of ethics so much, you're making a pretty fine distinction there, witch."

 _And it kind of says something right there that you think I'm taking an unreasonable ethical high ground when I won't fuck you while I'm in a mood to make somebody hurt._ They were getting close enough to the front to make continued conversation dangerous, but she went on, anyway. "Playing with what someone sees outside of their head and playing with what goes on inside of it is a _huge_ difference," Bonnie hissed at Damon with enough force to make him look down at her as well as give her that warning tug against her arm. This time she pinched him back. "There are spells that I could have used to force you to come with me, but I would never do that, even if it meant that I had to do this alone or actually stay in Mystic Falls and pretend that I was okay until I eventually snapped and set the school on fire. Free will is not something that _anyone_ deserves to have taken away, not even you."

"I feel like most of that was wasted by lack of a street corner and bullhorn," Damon answered, but he was quiet afterwards. Probably because they were getting close enough to the bouncer for voices to start carrying. Bonnie still gave him a curious side-eye while she retrieved her ID and tapped it in the sequence that Kayla had taught her. The bouncer scrutinized it for long enough that Bonnie was certain the spell was going to wear off, and she was going to have to put her money where her mouth was on what she had just told Damon before he handed it back and allowed them entrance. The figure who had been standing just inside the door while they were waiting in line was not within sight, but Bonnie still had the feeling of being watched. She started to draw closer to Damon before she remembered that a person under compulsion would not have felt any reason for alarm.

She still must have done something obvious enough for Damon to sense, because he dipped his head and murmured down to her, "Good instincts." He put a kiss against the side of her mouth and shifted so that one hand had her by the arm, the other against his favorite spot in the small of her back, giving for all the world the illusion that he was the one in control. Bonnie shifted until she was able to rest her fingers against Damon's wrist in the place where his pulse should have been. If they couldn't talk freely, then they would just have to find a way to send other signals.

Bonnie sketched a question mark against Damon's wrist and raised herself up against his ear as if to murmur an endearment. She bit at his lobe instead and told herself that it was to maintain their cover, though the way that Damon jerked slightly before he had himself under control again still sent a different and darker thrill through her.

It wasn't taking Bonnie long to realize that Damon got nearly as much enjoyment out of her fucking _with_ him as opposed to simply fucking, as long as he still got to return the favor. He let his mouth drift along the line of her throat and made good and certain that she could feel his teeth before he answered, "Too many to tap out without making it look like Morse code, Matilda was aiming low. How many fires can you set?"

Bonnie let her eyes drift around the space that was already becoming crowded with bodies and echoed, "Too many to tap out without making it look like Morse code."

"Atta girl." Damon gave her a final retaliatory nip and rumbled something that was almost a laugh when Bonnie called his bluff and sent a warning of her own rippling through his mind. The prospect of mayhem had certainly improved his mod from what it had been at the hotel room. He started leading her around the edge of the dance floor, where people were wiggling so hard to the latest beat that even Bonnie could smell the fresh sweat and wondered what all of the exertion-dilated veins must be doing to Damon. Save for a strobe that made Bonnie's head ache over the middle of the floor, the lights were being kept low-- _the better to eat you with, my dear_ \--and the air was smoky with something that wasn't cigarettes, something vaguely sweet, though Bonnie looked and could not see incense burners. By the bar and on the outskirts were clear enough, but Bonnie couldn't see the features of the persons deeper out on the floor even when she squinted. The strobe caught the smoke and did eerie things with it, like watching animals moving through a horror-movie mist.

"If any of these booths were upholstered with vinyl, I would say that this was the biggest fucking cliche that I had ever seen." Even though he was still holding onto her with both hands, Bonnie had nearly forgotten that Damon was there.

"Do any of the humans in here know that they're with vampires?" Bonnie murmured.

Damon shook his head, dipping his head so that Bonnie felt him speak as much as she heard it. "A handful, maybe. Not most. Set up the right atmosphere, though, it makes it easier to forget or to think that you're remembering wrong if you catch a vampire who will let you go again when they're finished. Some of them might even come back for more." Bonnie stiffened and didn't realize that she was breaking character until Damon's hand flexed against the small of her back, looking around at the faces that she could clearly make out and wondering which ones had fangs hiding behind their lips. Even when he was pretending to be a boy, there was no "just" in front of it about Damon. Either a streak of latent honesty or simple laziness, he never put forth that much of the effort. "You should have been around right after Rice made it big. Good fucking Christ, _Twilight_ is nothing is in comparison."

"Pattinson doesn't do it for me and Cruise was already nuts by the time that I started paying attention." Damon gripped hard at the small of Bonnie's back as a couple wandered by; she went silent. Bonnie watched the pair carefully from beneath her cover of being entirely satisfied settled like a doll against Damon's side. The woman and the man were watching each other with nearly identical rapt expressions; Bonnie could not tell which of them was the vampire and which was the human, or what the odds were of the human making it out of here alive. She tightened her grip against Damon's wrist before she quite knew what she was doing, not attempting to send him any message other than perhaps that she was pissed. Damon squeezed back in warning, and Bonnie let out her breath in a long, slow exhale that made the female of the pair glance at her. Guess that answered the question of which one of them was the vampire, anyway. She made eye contact with Damon and watched him shake his head very slightly, though whether he was telling her that the woman wasn't one of the tomb vampires or that she really needed to keep it together better than this she could not tell.

Bonnie spent the next fifteen minutes following Damon in a wide circuit about the club and feeling him growing more and more tense, which was making it pretty damned hard for the one of them who was supposed to be artificially serene to remain calm. She finally squeezed at his wrist again and took them into a relatively deserted corner where it they could speak without being heard as long as they kept it low, coughing a little from the sweet-smelling smoke. It wasn't pot, of that much Bonnie was sure, but it was still making her head swim.

"What's wrong?" she whispered. "Do you see any of the tomb vampires here?"

"No," Damon said shortly. He had the hunter's look on again, still face and icy eyes, but the muscles in his arm and shoulders were tense. Trying to be as inhuman as possible; it was working. "The problem is that there are a lot of vampires, period. This could be something of a problem."

"Oh." Bonnie took a look at all of the alcohol, wood, and otherwise very flammable things within her mental if not physical reach and still felt the way that Damon was nearly vibrating with tension beside her. When the scary things were scared, that was when you started paying attention if you smart and wanted to see another sunrise, even if she was one of the scary things herself now. Bonnie still weighed how much power she felt welling up inside of her against how many flammable things there were inside the club and thought that it was a fight she would like to take on.

As Bonnie swallowed, Damon looked down at her sharply. "Your heart rate's going up," he said. "If you were really compelled, that wouldn't happen."

"Well, I'm sorry, but we humans don't have that much control over things like that," Bonnie snapped back, louder than she had intended, and then winced. She tried to stem the flow of adrenaline going through her, but she obviously didn't do such a good job. Damon swore and tugged her towards the bar so quickly that it was an effort for Bonnie not to drag her feet and then _really_ prove that she was still of sound mind and not a vampire plaything. It had ended explosively, to put things mildly, the last time that she had had anything to drink around one Damon Salvatore, but if he was right and they were surrounded by bloodsuckers, then she needed to calm down. _Fast_.

"Salvatore," a voice behind them said as Damon was giving the drink order and the thankfully human-appearing bartender wasn't doing more than giving Bonnie a disinterested glance. Damon tensed for the barest of seconds before he released Bonnie and gave her a little nudge to get her out of the way. Not to put her out of the way of danger, because that wasn't going to happen until the job had been finished and she would really hate to discover that Damon was in fact an idiot at so late a date, but so that they both had room to do what they each did best. Bonnie stepped out of her heels and nudged them to the side while Damon's body went loose-limbed and deceptively lazy. "I figured it would take you a day or two longer to work your way down here."

"Hi," Damon said to an unimpressive-looking man with ginger hair and blue eyes that had probably watered at least seven months out of the year while he had been alive. Bonnie took one look at the way that he was holding himself and knew, _tiger_ , without having to be told. The man gave her a once-over, head-tilted and obviously curious, as Damon went on, "So, since you obviously already know who we are and why we're here, we can skip the big villain speech and just--"

The gingery man was holding a drink. Bonnie wasn't close enough to actually smell it, but she had a feeling her guess wasn't going to be off as she caught at the rim of it with her mind, flipped it up so that the contents thoroughly doused the front of the man's shirt, and then whispered, " _Incendium._ " She was concentrating so hard that the flames leapt up straight blue rather than a cooler yellow or orange, and ran across the alcohol-soaked fabric like a living thing seeking revenge. The man fell back against a table, yelling, while every non-compelled human in the room started shouting and either running to help or running for the exits.

"I might have been going somewhere with that," Damon said to Bonnie as he reached behind him for a discarded glass, broke it against the edge of the bar, and then drove it into an attacking vampire's eye with a noise that Bonnie could hear even over the yells and the crackling of flames. The first vampire that she had set ablaze was struggling to get off of the table, so Bonnie pinned him there, so hard that the legs broke and sent the entire thing slamming down to the floor, where she kept him until it was finished. Damon scooped up one of the legs as it rolled towards him as deftly as if he and Bonnie had planned that from the beginning and staked the bar-glass vampire while it was still clawing at its face. None of the not-inconsiderable humans who weren't under compulsion were drawing close enough to get a good look at either Bonnie or Damon's faces, and she just might have counted herself lucky for small blessings if she didn't see that they were all being rounded up by people who did not yet have black eyes and a lace-like webbing of veins crawling over their faces just at the moment, but were certainly about to pull them out.

"Like hell," Bonnie said; she heard a whining in her ears like being on a plane with a bit of a headcold. Every drink in every hand exploded upwards into a gout of flame, catching more than a few vampires in the process, and clothing burned just as well when the body wearing it was dead. As it turned out, once Bonnie had them down, Damon was pretty good at staking them, and Bonnie started to think, _For the future: Damon exaggerates like a mother--_

Of the table legs that Bonnie had broken while making sure that the ginger couldn't get up again, two had rolled off for parts unknown and one of them was still trapped under the smoldering corpse, but that didn't stop a vampire from snatching it up and lunging at Damon from behind. He had the same blue and black coloring as Damon, but was stockier and more innocent of face until it came to his eyes. Damon might not have puppies and sunshine reflecting there, but at least he had _something_. Bonnie yelled something garbled and wrenched the vampire away from Damon with her mind, hurling him all the way back and over the bar as her ears finally, blessedly popped. Damon spun, and they made eye contact for about half a second before the stocky vampire was leaping back over the bar, someone was grabbing Bonnie from behind, and there were fangs digging into the side of Bonnie's neck. Bonnie hurled the body away from her with an extra shot of flame to make sure that they paid for their mistake, and didn't realize until a full five seconds and three dead vampires later why that may have been a mistake.

 _But it wasn't a part of our deal,_ Bonnie thought even though Damon had not been the one to bite her. Blood was gushing down the side of her neck; she sank down in a graceless heap onto her discarded heels, dimly felt someone picking her up, and then she was gone.

End Part Nine


	10. Chapter 10

Part Ten

Bonnie felt cold all over, and not as if this was still her body that she was resting in at all. If she was waking up a vampire, then she was going to be _pissed._ That she had never taken any of Damon's blood wouldn't have stopped someone from pouring their own down her throat while she had been unconscious. Bonnie had never asked him what it had felt like right after he had died, before he had made the final leap. _Missed opportunity._

"I know that you're awake. I can hear your heart rate changing."

That was what had screwed them over in the club, too. Bonnie might have to ask Damon for a few tips on that whole vampire control thing, if it would make it easier for her to hunt and kill like she needed to. For the time being, she focused very hard on opening her eyes and let everything else remain a problem to be handled another time. Her limbs felt heavy, and she could feel gooseflesh on her arms and legs. There was something sticky on the side of her neck. By concentrating very hard, Bonnie was able to open her eyes and turn her head to the side, while a very small part of her whispered that she really ought to be panicking when that was an accomplishment.

Kneeling down beside her was a vampire. Bonnie didn't need Damon beside her to point out what he was; she could have passed him on the street before any of the past several months had happened and would have known that there was something very wrong with him. It was the same stocky man from the club, the one that she had hurled back over the bar. His eyes were a muddier, less crystalline blue than Damon's, but that only made it more clear that there was no one standing behind them. From the beginning of their trip, Damon had at least been showing _some_ kind of emotion, even if it was more often than not satisfaction at how hard Bonnie was struggling against the urge to push him out the passenger door. This man was a shark who was only choosing, for the moment, to wear a set of blunt human teeth.

"It's kind an old wives' tale that witch's blood is supposed to make you stronger or something," the vampire explained, touching at the oozing wound on the side of her neck while Bonnie tried to lift her head. He lapped at his finger. "You just taste human, though."

"Fuck you." Bonnie dropped her head back down to a dirty cement floor and threw all of the energy that she had into a truly excellent brain explosion, something that would leave him with a literal gray paste occupying his skull when she was done so that she could take her sweet time following it up with fire. The air shivered, and the vampire leaned back with a frown line drawn down between his eyes, but he never went higher than mildly annoyed by the time that Bonnie's strength gave out and she had to stop.

"Sorry," he said without sounding it in the least. "I took a little more than your standard Red Cross nurse. You're not going to be up and at 'em for awhile." He rose from his crouch, picking Bonnie up as he went and not bothering to support her head when she was too weak to hold it up herself. From this painful, upside-down vantage point, Bonnie caught a glimpse of stone walls, timber that ranged from ancient to so new that she was amazed to not smell the sap, the bright blue of tarps. A construction site. She had woken in a shady space broken up by intermittent patches of light, but as Bonnie blinked and squinted, she realized that she had been out for several hours. The sun was already over the horizon; it looked like eight or nine am, at least.

Which meant that she was either being carried by the stupidest vampire in the history of everything, and her little dilemma was about to solved with nothing more serious than a bruise on the behind when he dropped her en route to bursting into flames, or she was in very serious trouble and Damon was probably dead.

Bonnie was still wearing the dress from the club, splattered with blood along her chest and collarbone and riding up on her thighs from the damsel way that the vampire was carrying her. Against her bare skin she could feel very distinctly, forever cool because it was being worn on a body that was never going to be as warm as hers, the imprint of a metal ring. _Fuck._ Okay. Fine. This was bad. She had known that it could very well get bad when she had started out. Bonnie took several deep breaths and tried to focus on her power, but when she was dangling mostly upside down and all of the blood that she had left was rushing to her head, primarily she was accomplishing something by not being sick into her own hair.

"So witch's blood does nothing," the vampire carrying her said. Bonnie craned her neck as much as she was able and saw that they were now standing on patchy grass and sand that looked as if it had been trucked in. A handful of forgotten screws lay on the ground almost directly beneath her while the vampire paused and stood very still for several moments. Had Bonnie been able to lift her head far enough, she thought that she would have seen him raising his face to bask in the sun. "And you're neither compelled nor taking vervain. Why _was_ he keeping you around?"

Bonnie made note of both the past tense and the insinuation and said the only thing that she could say, "He likes it when I'm cranky."

"Ah." The vampire resumed walking again; Bonnie twisted far enough to see that he was taking her towards a haphazard pile of stones that she had to squint hard in order to realize was actually a well, all of its wooden parts long since rotted away in Miami's humid, salty air. She twisted the other way, ignoring the vampire's thoughtful, "Squirmy little thing, aren't you?", and saw that the structure that she had been unconscious in was actually a large stone house, half fallen-in at several points and clearly midway through restoration. New panes of modern, weather-insulated glass were leaning against old frames that looked like the gaps of missing teeth.

 _He's not seriously going to--_ Bonnie started to think before the vampire hoisted her up and then dropped her straight down into the darkness of the well without a second thought. She had time for a scream, raspy and weak, as she realized how far she was falling. Three full seconds before she landed on something that had the unmistakeable feel of a body. Bonnie forced back a second scream that felt like choking and tried to scramble backwards on limbs that didn't want to obey. There wasn't much room to move; she had barely wriggled back a foot in a dank combination of mud and cold, foul-smelling water before her back hit a perspiring stone wall. And she was still close enough to whatever it was she had landed upon that she could feel her bare feet touching its leg. The leg moved.

 _I might die down here, but I am not about to do it jibbering insane,_ Bonnie told herself firmly. That didn't stop a shake from entering her voice as she said, "Oh, please, please be Damon, I do not want to find out that zombies are real."

"I always do what I can to make a lady happy," Damon said, sounding very tired and almost as if he were under the water himself. "And, no, not so far as I know."

Bonnie let out a long, whooshing exhale without caring that Damon would be able to hear both it and the way that her heart rate changed and know that she was actually relieved to learn that he hadn't exited this earth just yet. "What's wrong?" she asked. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she saw that Damon was sitting across from her in a space that was no more than four feet at its widest, and maybe thirty feet deep when she craned her neck to try to see how far away they were from the sky. He wasn't leaning back against the stone like Bonnie was, too woozy from blood loss to do much in the way of holding herself up. Bonnie squinted and thought that it was more like he was arching his back to get as far away from her as he possibly could.

"What's wrong?" she asked again.

"Five broken ribs, and I'm pretty sure that there's something wrong with my femur," came Damon's immediate response. "Since I can feel those things at all, throw a healthy dose of vervain on top of that, I don't..." He certainly sounded as if he had been drugged.. "Quite remember. And someone has my ring."

"I saw him." Something in Damon's voice sounded wrong in a way that had nothing to do with being sick and in pain that Bonnie could register even though she was feeling pretty sick and in pain herself, and it made several different warning sirens go off in her brain at the same time. She pulled her feet away from Damon's leg and tucked them up under her thighs as she watched him warily.

"Oh, good." Even in the gloom, Damon's eyes glittered. "Then as soon as we get out of this, we can change things up a bit, _you_ point him out so that _I_ can set him on fire." Bonnie started to relax at hearing Damon talk about future things, until he added, in a voice that didn't sound as if his teeth were fitting quite right in his jaw any longer, "You smell really good, Bonnie."

She smelled like sweat and fetid water, not perfume. Bonnie pulled back further against the wall until she was fairly certain that there would be pebbled bruises marking her skin if they-- _once_ they got out of here and wondered if she had enough juice in her to physically force Damon into staying over on his side if it should come down to it, like children dividing up a room with a line of tape but with some teeth behind it. Her stomach started twisting and her head spinning when she even tried to come up with the necessary words for the spell, so maybe not so much.

"How close are you to losing control?" she asked quietly. Damon's eyes were a quick-silver flash before he looked away again. Bonnie had an idea that he was trying not to focus on her spilled blood.

"Closer than you want to know," he answered.

Bonnie fought back the urge to touch at her oozing neck, given the filth that her hands were resting in, and asked, trying to keep Damon's attention away from the fact that she was potentially a meal, "Why did they drop us down here instead of just killing us?" She didn't want to think about how long the vampire now wearing Damon's ring had been watching her while she had been unconscious. While there weren't a whole lot of ways that this situation could actually get worse, she was fairly certain that leaning over and making herself weaker by vomiting was one of them. "I am going to like burning that one a _lot_." The customary flash of rage came over her, but this time it didn't feel like something that belonged to someone else, or that she should be ashamed of.

Damon laughed, low and rumbling. "Bonnie Bennett, you are my kind of girl," he said from his side of the well. His voice was lower and more ragged than it should have been, but at least he now sounded as if his teeth were fitting into his mouth. There was a white flash in the gloom. Bonnie thought that it was his bared throat, that he was tilting his head back against his side of the wall that he would not have to look at her and her bloodied neck. "Too much time reading Anne Rice and not enough reading comic books," he went on after a pause so long that Bonnie was starting to think that he had lost the thread of their conversation. "They're hoping that I'll snap and snack on you just in time for the sun to get high enough to reach us all the way down here and then fry me. Poetic or some shit."

Or some shit. Bonnie craned her neck again to gauge the angle of the sun at the upper part of the well and didn't realize until Damon made a muted sound that was way too much like some of the ones he made during sex that she had cracked open one of the fragile scabs on her neck and started it to oozing again. She put her hand against the slick stones to steady herself and pulled her legs underneath her. Her dress clung to her thighs as she lifted herself up from the muddy water, and she started shivering almost immediately. Whether she was sitting and looking at salvation from three feet up or standing and looking at it from just over five, the distance was still large enough to be an eternity.

"Okay," Bonnie said, half to herself. Damon shifted behind her, and she tried to throw up a barrier to keep him where he was. He grunted as he felt the magic falling down over his skin, but continued to move. Bonnie turned and saw him struggling up to his feet, visibly favoring the injured leg. The near foot of height that he had on her wasn't going to get them within reaching distance of pulling themselves out, either, even if they didn't have the sun to contend with once they reached the top. Damon was keeping his face turned away from her, too, which frankly frightened Bonnie even more than he would have if he had looked at her with eyes like those of the vampire that had dumped her in here with him in the first place. "Stay where you are," she ordered him in her strongest voice, even though this little predicament that the were in wasn't sexy in the slightest and she wasn't certain what she had to throw at him if he ignored her.

Damon held up his hands and collapsed heavily back against the stone as his bad leg gave out on him. "Sorry, little witch," he said, sounding as if he even meant it. "But if we get out of here, it's not going to be on my back."

Bonnie barked out a laugh before she could stop herself, and then put her hand against her mouth before she remembered why that was such a bad idea. She spent the next several seconds spitting out mud so that she could answer. "Damon?" she asked. "I am leaning against a wall because I will fall right back on my ass in this mud if I don't. I am barely staying conscious right now, let alone doing magic. If you think that it's going to be on mine, then we are in big fucking trouble." Too late she remembered that maybe letting the vampire who had already admitted to being on the verge of losing himself know that she was low on fuel was a bad plan.

Damon twitched as if he were shaking a mosquito from the back of his neck, closest thing to acknowledgement of the barrier that she had tried to throw down over him a few moments before as she was likely to get. His teeth were a silvery glitter when he smiled, and way, way too close to her in the small space. "Then as I see it, we have two options," Damon said, sounding grimmer than Bonnie thought that she had ever heard him, but also less as if he were struggling to speak to her from somewhere deep underwater. She was horribly afraid that it was the smell of fresh blood that was doing it, too. He was keeping his body inclined away from her, but even in the shadows Bonnie could see the strain. Damon lowered his head to his own wrist, and Bonnie didn't realize what was happening until she heard the sound of flesh breaking, way too close to the sound of a peach's skin giving way, and saw the dark smear of his blood.

If he wanted to see if she was capable of scrambling straight up the interior of the well and over the top via pure disgust, then he was a devious bastard, but also a successful one. Bonnie leapt back hard enough to bark her shoulder against the wall and tear one or two of her stitches, sending a little tickle of warmth down her bicep. Oh, good, more blood for Damon to salivate over like a rabid dog while she definitely couldn't get away from him and wasn't certain that she could control him.

"What the _fuck_ are you doing to yourself, are you crazy?" Bonnie demanded, though she still didn't go any nearer to him to see how deep the wound actually ran.

Damon tongued the blood from his lower lip and made a face before he spit it to the side. "The wound's not closing, do you see that?" he asked. "That means I need blood, and I need it badly, to heal myself and to get the vervain out of my system. You are the only blood that I have near to me right now." He took a deep breath, and Bonnie did not like at all how much he sounded as if he were steadying himself. Damon was supposed to be aloof, smart-assed, happily amoral and violent. He was not supposed to be...this. _When the scary things are scared,_ Bonnie thought again. If she counted as one of the scary things now...yeah, pretty much.

"Two options," Damon repeated. "The first is that I eat you, and then I die anyway, because you don't have that much blood left and the sun is still going to catch me out once it gets high enough."

"Lovely," Bonnie said faintly.

"Just the facts, ma'am. Option two is that I still snap and drain you, but I pull back in time to turn you, and then we both die together. You'll be too pissed off at me for turning you against your will to enjoy the romance of it, and I don't want to find out if my ghost theory is right any more than you want to meet your grandmother again before you can lay a whole lot more vampire heads at her feet."

That would have gotten his ass thrown against another wall, had she been capable of it, and Bonnie was on the verge of saying so when Damon added in a tight, nearly trembling voice, "Don't get too mad at me, Option One is kind of the winning horse right at the moment."

It was like being thrown into the tiger pit at the zoo, only without the gamey scent or anyone with helpful tranquilizer guns coming to rescue her. "What about Option Three?" Bonnie asked slowly, staring at the wound on Damon's wrist as it continued to ooze. Drops of blood trailed down his fingers and then into the water; that the sunlight was now far enough down the line of the wall for her to see that well told her that she had better made her choice quickly.

"Option Three's trainer scratched him out of this race, sorry." Damon lifted his head and stared at her neck hard; Bonnie considered the line of sunlight creeping down the wall and wondered if she had enough juice in her current state to keep Damon pinned where he was until it got late enough for his natural enemy to do her job for her. She dismissed the idea less than a minute later, surprising herself by feeling a little ashamed that she had let it enter her head at all. The practical problem was that a dead Damon was only going to save her until her new friend wandered back to check on their progress, and beyond that...she and Damon had made a deal. He had done everything that she had asked of him when it came to honoring it, and letting him die without a fight was going against the spirit of their bargain even if it was still abiding by the letter.

"Will the vervain in your blood do anything to me?" she asked.

"If I turn you? You'll be too weak to feel the difference."

"No," Bonnie said slowly. "If I drink from you, right now. Will it do anything to me?"

Damon finally looked her straight on again in his shock, even if it did last only a second or so before his attention went back to her neck. "What?"

"Stefan healed me when he gave me his blood," Bonnie said. "Yours will do the same, it'll give me enough magic back to get us out of here. I'll have to get a lot closer to you, though, and you'll have to...not eat me."

"No, the vervain in my blood won't do anything to you while you're still human," Damon said. "The rest...Bonnie. If nothing else, have faith that I will never, ever blow smoke up your cute little ass."

If Damon wasn't going to be in control, then Bonnie had better find the ability to take over the task from somewhere. Drinking vampire blood was just one more step down the path that had taken her from working with one to sleeping with one to even being okay with the fact that another one had been girlfriends with her great-grandmother and was maybe not even a horrible person. Or, she could and Damon could both die here and then find out whose ideas on the afterlife turned out to be correct.

"Give me your wrist," Bonnie demanded in a tone that probably would have been a lot more imposing if she had been able to stand up without the benefit of the wall behind her. Damon obeyed, Bonnie took his arm in her hands. His body temp was even lower than normal in their chilly surroundings, but still felt him shiver at her touch as if she were the cold one. Bonnie looked up, and Damon was carefully looking away from her, standing very still save for a muscle twitching in his cheek and, once, his throat moving up and down. From what she could see of his profile, his expression was as inhuman as she had ever seen it. Bonnie started to put her other hand out and against his chest in the warning gesture that she had done so many times before before deciding that the less that she touched him right about now, the better off they would likely be. She still curved her fingers more tightly about his arm and didn't realize until she was doing it that it was intended more to reassure than it was to blast him right back into the earth if he tried something.

"Bonnie?" Damon asked her in a strangled voice that once again sounded as if his teeth were not quite fitting correctly into his mouth. "You really, really need to get out with this."

"Damnit, damnit, _damnit._ " Cringing the entire time, Bonnie lowered her mouth to the weeping bite wound on Damon's wrist.

He tasted like blood at first, just blood. Bonnie wondered at first what she had been expecting, rock candy going off inside her mouth or something since she had been too far out of it to remember Stefan, but Damon tasted like copper and salt and nothing else to differentiate him from any other time that she had cut her finger and then stuck the digit into her mouth without thinking. She let her mouth fill and then swallowed, which in turn brought more blood flowing into her mouth while Damon continued to tremble like a highly-bred horse. Bonnie took a second mouthful and forced that one down, too, before she raised her head and said, "I don't think that it's work--"

Or, okay, so the fireworks were going to happen in her veins rather than her mouth and down her throat. Bonnie swore and stepped back as her vision went bright for a few seconds, her ears nearly exploded, and she could see every single detail within the well down to the fresh drops of condensation being born upon the stone, hear everything from the raspy breaths that Damon didn't need to her own heartbeat, faster and the blood heading to whole new places which proved that Matilda wasn't a liar. _Is this what he sees?_ Bonnie thought in the brief interlude before the flash was gone and she was her again, albeit a her who didn't feel quite so much like she had just been hit with a truck and was nearly vibrating with the urge to...to go _do_ , she would figure out what after she had gotten there. Bonnie put her hand against her neck, felt her muddy fingers sliding against smooth flesh that had no mark.

"Holy crap," Bonnie said.

"I can't be the only one getting a sense of deja vu here," Damon said. He was sagging up against the wall, but he was looking at her again.

Bonnie slid her fingers around her neck, but the bite wound was completely gone, and all that was left was the dried and drying mess on her neck and staining the shoulder of her dress. She leaned down and quickly scooped up a palmful of water to rinse the worst of it away before she asked, "Does that make it easier for you?"

Damon nodded. "A little. Not saying you should rest on that, though."

Bonnie reached down deep for her magic and found it there, ready for her. She took a few breaths and didn't let herself relish the sensation of actually being able to stand on her own two feet rather than needing to lean against the wall with a spinning head. "At least I got you if you snap. No brain explosions either, promise."

"Magnanimous of you," Damon said. The fact that he sounded better didn't mean that he sounded _great_ , either, and the sun was creeping lower down with every moment.

"Some of us little humans make a distinction between what you choose to do any what you can't help, believe it or not." Bonnie craned her neck to view the circle of cheery blue sky. "I saw some tarp up there," she said slowly.

"Are you going to make us a _magic carpet?_ " Damon snapped at her. He was paler than he should have been when Bonnie looked at him, and his eyes were the color of dimes.

"Damon?" Bonnie asked, looking up at the top of the well and trying to remember as much as she possibly could about the layout of the construction site above, trying to picture every single detail as vividly as she could. She felt better--she felt a _fuck_ of a lot better, and not a little like she had taken a hit of pure oxygen while she had had her lips attached to Damon's wrists--but she still wasn't certain that she was going to have another burst in her if this one failed, or be able to hold Damon back if he snapped. Neither did she think that it was quite fair to be taking another hit off of the bong pipe _You're betting your life on Damon Salvatore, do you realize that?_ Yeah, well, it hadn't been the first completely insane thing that she had done since going below the belt to get him in her car in the first place. And right at the moment? He was betting his life on her, too.

"You really need to shut up," Bonnie finished. Damon, thankfully, chose this moment as one of the five times per century that he could actually do that and remained still, watching her, as Bonnie tried to remember details that she had seen while upside down and nearly unconscious. The tarp had been over a wheelbarrow containing unmixed cement. It had been..twenty-five? thirty-five? yards away from the entrance to the well. She could reach that far. She knew that she could.

Bonnie concentrated on bringing the tarp to her the same way that she had slammed Damon against a wall a few days before, except that that had been an explosion of emotion that didn't really care what happened afterwards and this had to be subtle, a scalpel instead of a hammer. Bonnie couldn't be the girl from the club this time. She didn't dare to even exhale until she heard something dragging against the grass above their heads, and then a shadow fell across the top of the well and made it nearly impossible to see anything at all. Damon was a gray blur a few feet away, saying slowly, "Good plan, little witch. Now I can eat you at my leisure."

"I will pull your head off first and we both know it," Bonnie said, even though her heart was beating faster from the exertion of even getting the tarp over there. "Okay. Your turn."

"My _what?_ "

"I can't levitate us out of here, I don't think that I would have had the juice for that even if I was at all full strength," Bonnie said flatly. She didn't think that taking any more blood from Damon was a good idea, either, for the both of them. "Can your leg get us up there or not?" Because the only other option, from where she was standing, was to shove the tarp back off and then hold Damon at bay until the sun came down far enough to kill him.

She had blocked out all light but the faintest of glows; she could not see Damon's expression. His voice might have been amused under any other circumstances as he said, "Come here and put your arms around my neck."

"Oh, lovely," Bonnie said faintly. Limbs next to the mouth of a hungry vampire. She couldn't think of a single way that that was going to end well. Bracing herself, Bonnie stepped up to Damon and embraced him as if they were about to start dancing. She felt his breath fanning out across her cheek.

Damon said, "That's sweet and all, but I can't exactly climb that way."

Bonnie felt blood rising in her cheeks. "I'm still woozy, okay?" She stepped back and around him in an awkward waltz that used up most of the small space and resumed her grip from behind.

Low-voiced, Damon added, "You really didn't need to be that close to my teeth, anyway." He adjusted her grip a little lower and said, "Wrap your legs around me if you need to."

"I'm wearing a _dress_ ," Bonnie blurted out, before she remembered firstly that that horses was already in the next county, and secondly that her dress was so soaked from the water and mud that she might as well not be wearing anything, anyway. "Shut up."

"So you keep saying. We'll blame it on blood loss." Damon tugged Bonnie's arms lower yet again even though he didn't, strictly speaking, need to breathe, she wasn't going to be choking him out even if her forearm did slip and strike him in the windpipe.

 _He doesn't want my arm that close to his mouth,_ Bonnie thought, and shivered abruptly. Damon didn't comment on it, saying only, "Hold on tight," before he started fitting his hands and feet into any rough space in the stone wall large enough to hold them and a few that Bonnie swore weren't and started lifting them up. She tightened her grip in anticipation of it being fast enough to make her nauseous, the way that she had seen him move before when he was deliberately trying to freak her out, but it was the opposite, painfully slow. Emphasis on the painfully; Damon made a short sound when Bonnie pulled her legs up and wrapped them about his waist, presumably pressing against the broken ribs, and then another when the bad leg wobbled under him. The wobble abruptly became an outright slip, leaving them dangling halfway up by Damon's arms alone. Bonnie yelped before she could help herself while Damon scrabbled to find purchase again, and for a few seconds the air underneath them wasn't so vacant.

"Are you okay?" Bonnie asked when Damon resumed, more slowly than before. The bad leg was quivering badly enough for her to feel it from his body into her own.

"I still have some vervain in my system, so I'm not healing very quickly, and I'm not processing the vervain out of my system because I have to heal," Damon said, his voice a thick growl that Bonnie did not think this time had anything to do with the way that his fangs were fitting into his mouth. "I need blood. Not your problem."

 _I'm the closest source of blood that you have, I think that makes it by problem,_ Bonnie thought, but said, "Don't worry as much about hurting me." Damon snorted. "I'm serious. I'm glad that it's on your mind and all, but I can stop you if you slip. Let me pull my weight, here."

"Don't we make the pair," Damon muttered under his breath. Bonnie still thought that she felt him relax a little right up until the moment when he slipped again. Damon grunted when Bonnie tightened her grip on him reflexively and wound up driving her knee directly into his ribs. But they were nearly at the top.

Calling herself an idiot the entire time, Bonnie relaxed the grip that she was maintaing with her legs and let more and more fall onto her arms, which wound up tugging them upwards and directly beneath Damon's chin.

"Bonnie," he started, voice distorted with something that Bonnie was going to choose to believe was the pressure that she was putting against his windpipe.

"I trust you," Bonnie said. When Damon paused, she added, "With this, anyway."

"Never let it be said that I don't have a taste for noble morons," Damon said under his breath, so softly that Bonnie wasn't certain that she was meant to hear. Statements of trust or not, she was very aware of how tense Damon was beneath her as they finally reached the top and she could scramble up and over the top of the well with another of those subtle am-I-really-doing-that-nudges beneath her feet, trying as she went to avoid disturbing the tarp too much and torching Damon in the process. She landed on the ground beside it with a heavy thump and then lay there for a few seconds, letting the sunlight warm some of the chill off of her skin and trying to get the feeling back into her jelly-like arms. Bonnie only gave herself a moment or so of rest before she pushed herself back up and then went to Damon, trying to support the tarp with one hand and help him get his bad leg over the side of the well with the other. Her fingers were clumsy and so were his; there was a number of creative curses spoken whenever they slipped and allowed a beam of buttery sunlight to briefly touch some unprotected part of his flesh.

"There's an old plantation house being renovated about ten yards off," Bonnie said to Damon, feeling oddly ill at ease when she couldn't see his eyes and wondering when she had become able to read them so well. "Just follow me." She didn't speak again, let Damon follow the sound of her footsteps until they reached the remains of the house and he was in the shade. "Okay," Bonnie said, stepping back into the sunlight beaming down through a hole in the roof as Damon let the tarp drop.

His mouth twisted a little as he saw what she was doing. "Wise."

"I'm not doing it because of that." The sunlight felt so good on her skin, carrying with it a hint of salt and something citrusy-sweet, that Bonnie thought she might have been able to lay out here forever even if she hadn't been exhausted and still fighting back a throbbing headache, healing influence of Damon's blood or not. She sank down into a sitting position on the stone while Damon all but collapsed in his patch of shadow, throwing his arm across his eyes. Bonnie didn't exactly have a compact on hand, but she could look down and see that her legs and feet were muddy and criss-crossed with scrapes from bashing up against the wall when Damon had slipped and from climbing over the top. Damon looked downright sick, a gray cast underlying his paleness and shadows under his eyes that Bonnie could see even while he was masking most of his face with his arm.

"Then you're a moron." Damon looked out from under his arm at her, visibly gauging the distance between them. Bonnie felt a momentary urge to scoot further back into the light and held very still until it had passed. "I could drag you back in here with me before the sun could burn me too badly." He sounded eerily as if he was contemplating it.

Bonnie still didn't move back. "One," she said, lifting a finger to emphasize her point, "you've been voluntarily hanging out with Elena and Stefan for months now, so if you want to keep calling us all noble morons, that's fine, but you're just going to have to get over the fact that that's your type now." Injured, sick, and blood-starved, Damon could still pull one hell of a face at her. "Two, it wouldn't be the sun that would burn you and we both know it." Another face. He was like Play-Doh, sometimes. "And three--" Bonnie barely had time to register the rat from the corner of her eye before Damon was lunging across his patch of relative darkness for it, snatching it up and raising it to his mouth before it even had time to squeak. Bonnie heard a sound like a wishbone being pulled apart and realized half a second later that it had been the animal's neck breaking. She put her hand against her mouth as the rat's lifeless body sailed past her and landed out in the grass. Damon settled back down on his back and replaced his arm over his face, but not before Bonnie noticed that she shadows under his eyes were slightly less blue. "Oh. Okay, um, eww."

"We were getting dangerously close to a bonding moment," Damon said. "Have to nip those things in the bud while they're still small." He didn't seem inclined to say more, and Bonnie occupied the silence by turning and staring out across the empty construction site. She couldn't see her new friend, that but didn't mean much. Bonnie couldn't bring herself to believe that he would have gone far; he seemed the type that liked to watch.

"You nearly vibrate when you do that." Bonnie turned back and saw that Damon was watching her from beneath his arm again. "Are you about to run off and do something stupid?"

"I've spent the past several days doing something very stupid," Bonnie muttered, hopping up to her feet and pacing a short distance off. "You should have told me that Matilda and my great-grandmother knew each other."

"Why? So you could go in blazing right from the start? Where the hell would that have gotten us?"

"I should have known," Bonnie insisted. "If I had known how my grandmother felt, maybe I wouldn't have--"

"Fucked me?"

Bonnie wasn't certain that her faces were quite up to par with the ones that Damon could pull, but she still did her best as she flopped back down in the sunshine. "Ever since I learned about vampires and magic, I have thought that my grandmother hated what you are because of what you _do_ , how you hurt people. It turns out that, no, she was working out family issues rather than doing the right thing, so I'm _sorry_ if maybe I'm just a little snappish."

Damon rolled over, wincing a little as the weight was briefly transfered to his bad leg. "The more I hang out with humans, the more I realize how _young_ you all are," he said. "Has it ever occurred to you, Bonnie, that people can have multiple motives at a time? That maybe Sheila Bennett was pissed off at her mother's choice of friends _and_ disapproved of eating people?"

Well, if he had to go putting it that way and making _sense_. Bonnie rocked back and rearranged the damp remains of her dress across her knees. "You know, the whole vampires are totally emotionless thing?" she asked. "You should stop doing that. I like you a lot better when you're a person."

"Bonding moment," Damon said, holding up a warning finger. He looked towards the body of the rat with something that was very near to longing.

Bonnie shifted a little and wondered if she didn't need to move further back. "I _was_ going to tell you that I wasn't going to leave you alone here all day, but do you...do you need me to like, go to a hospital and get you a bag or two or something?" Damon stopped watching the rat and started watching her; Bonnie couldn't tell whether the glitter in his eyes was consideration of the fact that she was willing to procure blood for him or amusement at the fact that she had brought it up at all. Preemptively defensive, Bonnie added, "That looks like it hurts, and I don't want you eating a construction worker before I have a chance to warn them."

"It's Sunday, Bonnie." She drew back and blinked a little as she did the math in her head and realized that Damon was right. Even though it had been less than a week, she felt as though this mission had been going on for her whole life. "Does your cute little thing with your ID work on your whole body so you won't get hauled off as an assault victim?" Well, there was that small detail. Damon sighed, sounding as if was more for him than for her. "It hurts like hell, but I've dealt with it for longer than this before. I'll be all right."

His definition of all right clearly did not match up with hers. Bonnie looked around hopefully for another rat, but the sudden death of their brethren seemed to have warned off all other vermin, and she would have said that Damon looked one step up from dying if not for the fact that he was already dead. "I cannot believe that I am doing this," Bonnie muttered to herself before she scooted as close to the line of shadow as she could get without actually crossing it and tried to clean off her muddy wrist with the hem of her muddy dress, mostly just succeeding in swapping dirt from one space to the other. Damon propped himself up on his elbow and watched her without expression. "We couldn't have gotten out of there if you hadn't given me some of yours, so call this tit for tat." Damon's tongue came out and caressed at his lower lip, long and slow, as he realized what she was talking about and nearly made Bonnie change her mind about the whole thing right then and there. She said his name sharply to pull his attention back before she went on. "You told me that you're a man of your word. Do I have enough blood now to lose a little?"

Damon nodded slowly. "Your magic might not be up to full speed yet, but my blood healed the blood loss almost as much as it did the bite."

"And if I let you have some of my blood, will you be able to stop?" This time the nod was a little more jerky. "Okay," Bonnie whispered, mostly to convince herself. "Come here."

She expected Damon to dart at her the way that he had at the rat and was bracing herself to slam him back if he did. He rolled himself up to his feet with only the barest sign of lingering injury and crossed the few feet of shadow that separated where he had been resting and where Bonnie was kneeling at the very edge of the light and knelt again himself. He didn't reach for her; Bonnie was the one who put her wrist across the dividing line so that he could take it in his hands while his eyes and face changed. Even then, he cradled her arm with an exaggerated gentleness, like he was afraid of what he would do to her if he forgot himself. Damon lifted his eyes to hers and waited for her to nod before he lowered his mouth to her flesh.

The past several months of Bonnie's life had been spent mostly contemplating how much the authors of trashy vampire novels could go fuck themselves right in the ear, when they chattered on about how erotic feeding was. She had been expecting it to be awful, though, and outside of the first short, sharp prick of pain it was no different from donating blood under the watch of a nurse in a bad mood. Damon was taking great care not to suckle at the wound, but was instead letting Bonnie's blood fill up his mouth and then swallowing, a brief pulse of pain that then faded again into a dull ache as soon as he was done. His lids had fallen to half-mast and taken with them the vein-work around his eyes, but Bonnie still knew that they would not be blue if he were to look at her. Damon was holding her wrist with an exaggerated care, fingers trembling slightly and making Bonnie think of how quickly he could crack the bones if he were to lose control of himself for even a second. She waited until her head was starting to get just a touch wobbly on the inside the way that it did right before the nurse removed the needle during the school blood drive every year before she said, "Damon, that's enough." She put her hand against the back of Damon's neck in order to tug him away, but there was no need.

Damon slid his fangs from her wrist immediately, though he held onto her for just a second longer and traced his tongue around the edges of the wound to catch the blood that trickled out after before he rocked back. Bonnie rose to her feet right away while Damon stayed in his kneeling position for a few seconds longer, watching her. Blue. She had been wrong: they were just blue.

"I told you," Damon said, a little breathless and still pale. "I imprinted."

"I guess." Bonnie tore a long strip from the hem of her dress and wrapped it around her wrist before she came back and took a cautious seat again right at the edge of the sunlight line. Damon obligingly moved back in order to give her space, but that wasn't necessary. They both knew that she could stop him and that, more importantly, she could easily give an order that would mean she didn't have to. "Are you going to be okay until the sun sets?"

"You mean am I going to jump on the first person that I see and glut myself like a tick?" Damon even smiled, which definitely meant that he was feeling better. "Not part of our little deal, even if you did kinda make me break it there."

"I didn't _make_ you do anything," Bonnie said. "You could have toughed it out, buttercup."

"Leave the honorable stoicism to Stefan."

"Says the guy whose biggest role models appear to be medieval knights." Damon was lying back down in his shady patch, and he looked at Bonnie curiously when she settled herself into the sun again and started arranging her dress across her knees. "What is it?"

"When you asked if I was going to be okay for the day, I thought you meant that you were leaving."

"No, I was asking if you were going to be _okay_ ," Bonnie said, enunciating slowly. "Whatever, we've been in this together this far, we're not going to split up now."

"Yes, ma'am." Bonnie thought that Damon was going to sketch out a salute to her, but he turned solemn instead. "I suppose I should thank you," he said slowly, gesturing out in the vague direction of the well. "That's the second time that you've saved my life. I owe you two."

"One," Bonnie corrected. "You saved mine first, remember?"

"Oh, right." Damon's face cleared. "I did do that. Was that when you started to fall for me?"

"Don't get smug," Bonnie cautioned him. "You're good in bed, I'm not taking you home to meet my father."

"Won't." Damon put his arm back over his eyes. "Just pointing out while I'm here that I _did_ tell you that you might be the one who wound up donating a pint or two."

"Damon?" Bonnie asked sweetly. He made a sarcastic zipping motion across his lips without her actually needing to tell him to shut up, which meant that there was a learning curve to this thing, after all. In the lack of anything else to do, Bonnie looked around her and took copious mental notes, but if her new friend was anywhere near, he was being sure to stay well back. Didn't matter. They were still going to see each other again.

End Part Ten


	11. Chapter 11

Part Eleven

"You look like you're playing dead."

"Don't make me point out the obvious, Bonnie, neither one of us is in the mood for it."

Bonnie shielded her eyes with her hand and watched the sun as it sank down below the horizon, turning the air around them velvety-gray with humidity, slightest hint of gold that lingered on the surface of the wheelbarrows and shovels. As soon as it was safe, Damon folded his legs back underneath him and rose as lithely as if he hadn't been lying flat on his back for most of the day in an effort to conserve the energy that Bonnie's little bit of blood had been able to give him against injuries and vervain. He was moving more slowly and carefully than Bonnie was accustomed, but he no longer looked as if he needed to be in hospital. Bonnie glanced down at her wrist, where the bite wound that Damon had given her had grown over during the day into a shiny-pink weal of new scar tissue, bonus side-effect of the vampire blood lingering in her system.

Damon followed her gaze. "That'll be gone by morning," he said. "Don't worry, you won't have anything to explain to Daddy."

Bonnie traced the edges of the mark and discovered that it didn't even feel like a real scar, neither numb nor overly sensitive, but was instead just slightly warmer to the touch than the surrounding skin. "I don't even think that any mosquitoes bit me today," she said.

It was the closest that any of them were going to to come towards acknowledging that Bonnie very well could have left during the day but had stayed. Damon glanced sideways at her, but said only, "Indulge in vampire blood more often, sweetness. It's even good for your skin."

"I think I'll pass." Bonnie shielded her eyes to look towards the remains of the sun again. "Is it safe for you?"

"Let's find out." Damon hesitated a beat, then swung one foot slowly across the dividing line of shadow that had been keeping him out of the light for the day, hesitated again before he followed that step with the rest of his body and exposed skin. Though he blinked a few times and turned his face away from the west, he didn't scream, burst into flames, or do anything more dramatic than touching at the place where his ring should be with an expression that Bonnie knew well.

"Come on," Bonnie said softly, touching him on the forearm to bring him back to her. "Let's find out where the hell we are."

"You could have been doing that today while I was trapped there," Damon said.

"I didn't want to leave you all alone and unable to defend yourself," Bonnie answered. She fluttered her lashes when Damon made a face. "Since you were limping around like an old man and all."

Damon's response was to take Bonnie by the wrist and kiss the scar, which obligingly turned even warmer than before, and Bonnie really, really wanted to know why she had not gotten anything like this out of the deal the last time that Damon had bitten her. Maybe because he had been trying to kill her then, or because she had taken vampire blood after the fact, or because she had been in the middle of having her world thoroughly rocked in an unpleasant way for the next several hours afterwards. He beamed at her sunnily enough to let her know that enough of the vervain had been burned out of his system to return his senses to their full strength.

Bonnie scowled at him as she pulled her wrist out of his grasp. "Whoever gave you a copy of _La Morte d'Arthur_ when you were a kid had absolutely no idea what they were turning loose on the world," she said, turning and striding off across the restoration site, stepping carefully to avoid cutting her bare feet on rocks or glass. Her dress was long-since dry, but the dye had run out of the silk and made reddish splotches on her legs. Flakes of mud fluttered to the ground as she moved.

"It was my father, actually." Damon sounded reflective, though not necessarily in a good way. "I think that he was hoping it would inspire me to...curb in some of my more reckless impulses." Bonnie glanced back over her shoulder, but Damon looked as if were spending a moment or two in a space where Bonnie was not welcome to tread. She hiked her skirt up to shake some more mud off of the fabric and let him go forward at his own pace. "My favorite book is actually _Call of the Wild_."

Bonnie stopped, looked back. Damon's face was too carefully blank for her to know if he was fucking with her or not. "Chivalry and embracing your own bloodlust," she said flatly. "Well, I can't accuse you of doing things halfway." She heard Damon padding across the grass behind her, felt his hands about her waist. "Okay, the rules are back on--"

Damon slid his arm behind the backs of Bonnie's thighs and had swung her up into his arms before Bonnie quite knew what was happening. She started to unleash a burst of magic at his head and caught herself just in time, though the way that he smirked at her made her want to do it again immediately afterwards. "I never do things halfway," he said. "Where the fuck are your shoes, anyway, did you leave them in the well?"

"I left them in the _club_ ," Bonnie said, much more bitterly than she thought that she would be, but they had been good shoes, damn it. "They have my shoes, they have my car--"

"Bonnie, they have my _ring_ ," Damon snapped back. His hand against the back of her legs tightened. "Tell me you're not shocked that this doesn't sit well with me."

Bonnie tilted her head back so that she could look him in the face. Damon was staring straight ahead, and she didn't for one second think that he was trying to be a gentleman and avoid looking down the draping front of her dress. There was a muscle in his jaw ticking; he looked more like the monster who came out of the swamp to pick up the pretty young thing than the knight who carried her to safety.

"We got our asses handed to us, didn't we?" Bonnie said, rather than pointing out that Damon looked barely on the edge of control right now, and that there was a part of her who was starting to like that, a little.

Damon snorted. It was a terribly undignified noise for a vampire to make, all things considered. "That's a very restrained way of putting what happened to us. You could have been killed." Bonnie didn't know whether he was referring to her being bitten in the club, or just how many seconds down to the wire they had been pushing it in the well before he lost control of himself. "If they had any sense at all, we would both be dead by now."

"Then hooray for stupid villains." Bonnie flexed the arm that she had thrown about Damon's neck without realizing it. The air smelled mossy and old; they had made it down to a road that was at least paved, but it was cracked, pitted, and obviously not exactly a high priority to the county. Bonnie looked back over her shoulder at the house midway through restoration, but without the benefit of street lamps it was already long gone, and whatever boost that she might have gotten from drinking Damon's blood earlier was gone, too. She saw nothing but ink, broken up along the edges of the road by the even darker shadows of ash and elm. Even the road beneath Damon's feet was mostly guesswork. "I can walk," Bonnie said at long last, even though Damon didn't seem to be straining himself by carrying her.

He shook his head. "There's glass," he said. Hooray for vampire senses, too; Bonnie couldn't see a thing other than the fact that the road was still there. "You'll cut yourself."

She didn't think that he was worried about her collecting another set of stitches, especially when they had a handy medicine kit running through his veins. Even though the idea of a vampire doing his best to suckle the blood out of a bleeding foot was one of the more ridiculous that Bonnie had entertained in a long while, she asked seriously, "How much do you need to feed right now?"

"I'm not going to hurt you," Damon said, which wasn't exactly the response that Bonnie had been looking for. "Or make you hurt me."

"I could pin you down without hurting you, I think," Bonnie said.

"Well, we both know _that_ ," Damon answered. Up ahead, Bonnie was just starting to get a gleam of light and realized that Damon had been heading for it the entire time. "But now's not the time to talk about our sex life." He squinted through the gloom at the light that was slowly, slowly resolving itself into a porch light attached to a small, white clapboard house and then eased Bonnie back down to her feet. "You're good now, I think. What are your feelings on grand theft auto?"

Bonnie was still finding her balance under her again on a road that might not cut her feet to ribbons any longer but still wasn't exactly comfortable; it took her a few seconds for the rest of what Damon had said to catch up with her. "What are my thoughts on _what_?" she demanded. "Oh, no. No, no, no. We are _not_ stealing that person's car!"

"Then we _are_ going to have to walk all the way back to civilization, and we _are_ going to have to run the risk that one of the vampires from Cameo remembers that no one ever actually managed to kill James Bond by pulling that crap," Damon answered. "I'm not up to a fight just yet, are you?"

Bonnie weighed what she wanted to do with her magic versus what she realistically could right at the moment and swore creatively enough to make Damon's eyebrows go up. "That's a good girl," he said soothingly. "Look, it'll be easy. All that I have to do is go up and knock on the door--"

" _No compulsion!_ "

"At some point you're going to realize that I keep bringing that up just to hear you scream, and then it won't be fun any more," Damon said in a musing sort of tone. He brightened when Bonnie glared at him. "Okay, I'm lying, it's always going to be fun. Fine, we have to do this the hard, loud way. Just hope that whoever is in the house doesn't own a gun."

"I can always use you as a shield," Bonnie answered faux-sweetly. She then had to smother an obscenity as they encountered the jagged gravel of the driveway, this time without Damon offering to pick her up and carry her across the space. She should have thought to include a smugness clause in their deal, she thought, except that she would have had to kill Damon by the end of the first day and they would have gotten nowhere.

"Go around to the passenger side," Damon instructed Bonnie quietly as they came up on the house's sole visible vehicle, a truck that looked as if it might have come from Mayberry and had abandoned nearly every speck of paint behind as it had left.

"Are you going to pick the lock or something?" Bonnie asked him across the bed as she went around the back. She was keeping her voice pitched low, but a dog still woofed from behind the house, sleepily and as if it wasn't convinced just yet that it needed to be up. Damon looked at her without speaking; Bonnie sighed. "It's going to be 'or something', isn't it?"

"Smart girl." Damon drew his hand back into a fist and slammed it through the passenger window, scattering glass and making Bonnie shriek. The dog out back started baying to make up for lost time while a light came on in the house. Bonnie ducked while Damon wrenched the door open and dove into the cab, reaching for the wires beneath the steering wheel. The front door flew open.

"Hurry, hurry, hurry!" Bonnie yelled. There was a man in the doorway, and Bonnie didn't need to be able to see his face against the glow of the lights backing him to know that he was _pissed_.

"What the hell do you think that you're doing out there?" he yelled as he started across the lawn. He was holding a rifle in his arms that he had absolutely no problem bringing to bear on her; Bonnie could not believe that she was about to be shot and killed by a redneck while Damon was playing with wires.

The engine choked, coughed, and finally turned over with a sound to let Bonnie know that it would at least get them somewhere, however much it might bitch about it along the way. Damon lunged the rest of the way into the cab, unlocked Bonnie's door, and bodily yanked her in by the arm without caring overmuch about being gentle. She tucked her legs in behind her as a bullet pinged off of the closing door and Damon forced the truck into gear. It was able to do more than whine as it raced backwards down the driveway, bullets punching into the metal all the while, and then out into the road. Bonnie ducked as level with the dashboard as she was able and wondered why Kayla had taught her spells to deal with sneaking out of the house and into bars, but never something to deal with _this_.

The gunshots faded away and so did the frantic yelping of the dog; the headlights were bouncing in patterns like fireflies as Damon proved that speed limits were for other people across the ill-kept road. "You can sit up now."

Bonnie was not entirely convinced of that. She uncurled herself cautiously, looking first behind them at the last remains of the house and then at Damon. He had slivers of glass sticking out of his knuckles from punching the window; he kept the other hand upon the wheel in order to continue driving and deftly picked each piece out with his teeth, spitting them out the window. The injured knuckles he put into his mouth briefly after he was done, only to grimace and relieve himself of a mouthful of blood that way, too. There was enough light from the rising moon for Bonnie to see that the edges of the cuts were trembling, but not quite managing to draw together and heal. He hadn't been kidding around when he had said that vervain without sufficient blood to knock it out of his system was throwing him off of his game.

"Give here," Bonnie said, gesturing for his hand. She had the satisfaction of even seeing him look briefly surprised before he obeyed. Bonnie tore another strip from the hem of her dress, wrapped it around Damon's knuckles twice, and tied it off. The silk grew darker immediately. "That's going to have to do, spells for healing vampires weren't really big on my learning list."

"Good enough." Damon returned his hand to the wheel and pressed his foot to the gas pedal even harder, making the truck leap forward and roar in a tone that Bonnie would not have thought it capable of from the driveway. "I would have assumed you would be a little more high-strung about being a criminal."

"Assumptions, asses, yada-yada." Bonnie pulled her knees up onto the seat along with her and stared out at the dark road stretching out behind him. "Don't do anything else to this truck, though, I don't know what kind of insurance he has."

"That's my girl," Damon murmured in a tone so soft that Bonnie was not entirely certain that she had been meant to hear. He took a left turn hard enough that Bonnie was nearly thrown into him, guiding them through the back roads based upon no signposts that Bonnie could actually see.

"And stop driving so crazy, that guy's bound to be calling the cops by now."

"You are a wealth of contradictions, Bonnie Bennett." But he did slow down, at least a little.

"That's what keeps me interesting." They stayed mostly quiet, Bonnie exhausted down into her bones and starting to realize that it had been about twenty-four hours since she had last eaten, and Damon...she didn't know exactly how often vampires needed to feed in order to stay sated or what it felt like from the inside when that schedule was missed, and he didn't seem inclined to volunteer. As soon as the lights of Miami proper were close and not a handful of glitter against the horizon, though, he took them off of the highway and towards the first sign with a familiar blue-and-white cross that they saw. Both his hands, including the injured one, were clenched around the steering wheel so hard that Bonnie was amazed when he didn't pop anything out of socket. She swore that he would snap the neck of any cop who tried to pull him over en route to the hospital, the way that he was driving, and thus had to yelp and grab for the dashboard when he took the truck in an abrupt turn off of the hospital route and towards the familiar green and orange of a 7-11.

"You cannot eat a clerk when we are three blocks from a hospital," Bonnie warned, grabbing for Damon's arm. She wasn't certain if she was joking.

Damon, even though he had the door open and was halfway out before the truck had even rolled entirely to a halt, paused without shaking her off. "Oh, ye of little faith," he said. He waited for Bonnie to release him before he hopped down from the cab and strode inside. Bonnie stayed inside, reasoning that Damon's dark clothing could hide the fact that he was also completely filthy better than hers could, and also that she could see everything that Damon was doing through the glass walls of the convenience store. The clerk's neck remained untouched, though Bonnie could still seem him craning his neck over the counter to look at Damon's muddy pants, so maybe it was best that they moved along before he though to take a good look at the truck and then listen to a police report. She was still surprised when Damon climbed back into the truck and tossed into her lap a burrito, a bag of chips, and a bottle of orange juice.

"Did you actually pay for these?" Bonnie asked, picking up the food. She had been too focused all day long to pay attention to her stomach, but at the first whiff of grease its rumblings became the loudest noise in the whole world.

Damon rolled his eyes as he backed the truck out of the space. "I put aside my own hunger--which can kill people, by the way--long enough to get something for you, and the first thing that you ask is if I paid for it. That's nice, Bonnie. That's classy."

Bonnie took an enormous bite out of the burrito by way of apology; she might have spat it right back out again if they had been in Mystic Falls, but right now it was about the best thing that she had ever tasted in her life. "I want to make certain that you didn't compel the poor clerk."

"Actually," Damon said, with an aggrieved sigh as if he couldn't believe Bonnie's lack of trust in him. She would have more faith in his nonchalance once he had fed and stopped carrying himself like a clock that could spring apart in all directions at any moment. "I told him that we had been mugged and were on our way to the police station, but that you were diabetic and needed to eat right away."

"Wow," Bonnie said, impressed with the cover story in spite of herself. She doubted that she would have been able to come up with one as good on so short a notice.

"It wasn't hard while you were sitting out in the front seat and looking all doe-eyed and pitiful." Damon pulled them into the hospital parking lot. He was already leaning forward slightly in his seat, like a hunting dog going to point, and Bonnie wondered if he could smell the blood inside from all the way out here.

"I was glaring at you."

"Keep telling yourself that, sweetheart." Damon hopped down from the truck and paused a moment before he shut the door, as if waiting for Bonnie to grab him by the arm and issue her customary dire warnings. She didn't know which one of them was more disappointed when she didn't.

With Damon gone, Bonnie finished her food quickly and then got out of the truck herself, walking in a circle around it with her arms wrapped around her midsection. With food came energy came magic, which inevitably led to what was going to happen next. "Guess we didn't give you that much of a showing, Grams," Bonnie muttered to herself, hand coming up involuntarily to touch the place on her neck where she had been bitten. If the blue-eyed bastard (who wasn't _her_ blue-eyed bastard) knew what her blood tasted like, then who knew how many other people had fed upon her while she had been unconscious. Bonnie started pacing the other way and just barely stopped herself from kicking at one of the truck tires, because a broken foot was not going to be something that she could walk off when there was probably a standing order to keep an eye out for a runaway matching her description at hospitals far outside of Virginia by now.

"Miss, are you all right?"

Bonnie jumped and spun. Looking at her with concern was a man in his twenties, wearing scrubs and dark circles under his eyes large enough that they were their own accessories. Bonnie barely fought back an urge to swear. Damon had parked the truck far back in a darkened corner of the lot, presumably so that no one could get a good look at it, or her, until he returned. It would just _have_ to be the case that interns got all of the crap spaces.

She was apparently wearing enough of a rabbity, damsel-in-distress expression to be a cause for concern in and of itself, because the guy came stepped closer. "Do you need me to walk you into the emergency room? Or you could stay here and I could get a wheelchair--"

"I'm fine," Bonnie said, just a second too late and just a second too loud. This was the second time that a medical professional wanted to intervene for her own good since she had started associating with Damon Salvatore, too. She could tell that the intern didn't believe her for one second, since her hair was a disheveled mess stained with mud at the tips in more place that one, her legs were similarly coated, and the hem of her dress was ragged and nearly indecent from tearing off strips to bandage first her wrist and then Damon's knuckles. "My, uh, my boyfriend and I were in a car accident." She would just have to hope that the intern didn't look at the truck too closely and realize that the only damage was to the driver's window.

"Well, let's definitely get you inside and get you checked out, then," the intern said, reaching for her. Bonnie took two steps back, putting her right up against the truck, and really hoped that she was not about to have to use her magic on an innocent person who was only trying to do the right thing.

"No, I'm really okay," Bonnie said. "I'm just waiting on my boyfriend to finish getting his hand stitched up, and then we're going to be on our way. I didn't hit my head or anything, promise."

The intern looked dubious. Bonnie had never thought that she would have a reason to be annoyed by idealism, but it was really screwing up her night right about now. Resigned, she started pulling up her magic, when Damon said from behind the intern, "Everything all right here, babe?" The intern jumped about as high as Bonnie imagined she had when he had snuck up on her, and his gaze immediately fell to Damon's hand. Damon's perfectly whole hand, which no longer even had the remains of Bonnie's dress wrapped around it, because why would it be? He was a vampire, and thus his accelerated healing had come back right at the moment when Bonnie could have greatly benefited from him looking more like a tired and battered human, damnit. At least feeding had brought some color back into his face so that he was no longer so etched-marble pale.

Bonnie could see the intern's mind working over the fact that Damon had just referred to her as "babe" and hurried, "I'm all right. How's Johnny doing?" If he mouthed off, she swore to God, they were going to have to bring an ambulance over here even though he was a damned vampire.

"Johnny's doing great," Damon answered slowly. "They think that he'll be out of surgery in a couple of hours."

"Surgery?" the intern started. Bonnie shoved past him, grabbed Damon by the arm, and all but threw him towards the truck before she skittered around to the passenger side. By some miracle of miracles, she was hoping that the intern wouldn't take that moment to realize that the truck had been running the entire time that he had been talking to Bonnie.

"I could have just compelled him," Damon sing-songed to her as they pulled out of the lot, thankfully at a pace that wasn't going to arouse any _more_ suspicion. Bonnie made a face at him. "You're cute when you're cranky."

"And you're in a good mood when you've just fed." Bonnie started rubbing the dried mud out of the tips of her hair, already picturing what the shower was going to feel like. She would have to ask Damon to break the door lock or else hope that her telekinesis was refined enough to pick it, she had no idea where the motel key had gone.

"Yes, that tends to be a common trait among _vampires_ ," Damon said without rancor. "Aren't you going to ask me _how_ I got past a whole hospital full of equally nosy do-gooders as our friend back there without being flagged down?"

Bonnie kept her gaze fixed on her hair and said, "I guess I'm going to have to trust you." She looked up, and Damon had a strange expression on his face. Bonnie reached over and yanked on the wheel. "But not to drive, apparently."

"I'm going to have to take you out and show you what these reflexes can really do sometime," Damon said, but he at least turned his eyes back towards the road. "So, fearless leader, you given any thought towards what we're going to do next?"

"What do you mean?" Bonnie shrugged. "Okay, so we got beaten one time--"

"Bonnie, dear heart, goddess on a pedestal _and_ freak in the bedroom," Damon said, until Bonnie picked up the empty juice bottle and hit him with it, "we didn't get beaten. We got our asses ripped off and then handed to us with a neat little bow wrapped around them, and I for one do not intend for that to happen again."

Bonnie pulled back against the passenger door and swore that she felt the interior of the truck getting colder. "I'm not holding you to this any longer than you want to be here," she said flatly.

"Don't sulk," Damon said, leveling his finger at her. "We both know you're not the sulking type."

"No, I'm the--" Bonnie imitated Damon's head-exploding gesture. "Type."

"But you're also the good person type, so you're not going to do that." Damon could at least manage to look like he thought Bonnie might do that. "You can stop giving me those dove-puppy genetic experiment eyes, by the way. The sons of bitches have my ring. I'm not leaving this town until I get it back."

"Then what's the problem here?"

"I'm saying that _you_ might want to leave," Damon answered as he pulled the truck into the darkened lot of a grocery store a few blocks away from the motel. He got out himself and then shocked Bonnie by coming around and opening the passenger door for her, giving her his hand as if she really were stepping down from a coach while encumbered by a lovely and impractical dress.

Bonnie pulled her hand free just as soon as she was on level ground again. "No," she said in a tone that nearly frosted the air in front of her face. "No way. Not until the vampires that killed Grams--"

"I didn't see a single one of them in that club, Bonnie," Damon told her seriously. He hesitated a beat and then cupped her face, ducking a little so that they were eye to eye. "If they know that a witch is after them, especially a Bennett witch, then odds are good that they've already lit out and are scattered halfway across North America by now. You might never find them all even if you spend your whole life looking." Damon released her and stepped back. "And you don't have nearly as much of it as I do."

Bonnie was going to deal with the fact that Damon had just expressed sincerity and a concern for her welfare that didn't appear to have anything to do with the fact that she gave him really good orgasms at a later date. She took a breath, and then another, as she processed the _also_ fact that Damon might be right. And yet-- "How many people does this pack kill every year, do you think?" she asked, thinking, _Grams, I'm sorry,_ without being certain that it was necessary or exactly what it was that she ought to be sorry for.

Damon rocked back and forth on his heels for a few moments, looking at her. Bonnie swore, if he tried to lie just because he had decided he knew what was best for her--

"Hundreds," Damon said flatly. "This is a town of transients, from tourists to runaways. People don't come home all the time. So even if they're compelling some of the victims to forget and still letting them live--"

"Hundreds," Bonnie repeated after him. "Got it." She started marching down the sidewalk towards the hotel. She could feel Damon trailing along to the side and just behind; while well-fed and vervain-free he made no more noise than a ghost.

"Why do I get the feeling that something reckless is going through that pretty little head of yours, and that I already know what it is?" he drawled.

"It's the right thing to do," Bonnie said stolidly.

"Oh, and here I thought that it might have something to do with revenge," Damon said. Bonnie glanced over her shoulder at him, her eyebrows drawing together.

"But you just said that all of the tomb vampires were gone."

Damon looked genuinely surprised, and if Bonnie hadn't been getting such a bad feeling she might have taken a moment to mark the occasion. "I was really hoping that you had taken that 'more than one motivation' thing to heart," he said. "I thought that you had figured it out. Bonnie, there was only one other person who knew that we were going to be at Cameo last night."

Bonnie thought about it for a second and then spent a few more after that calling herself eighteen different kinds of idiot for letting herself believe, even a little, that _maybe_ this one was different, too, in the way that Stefan was different and she thought that Damon could be if someone kept his head out of his ass for him, before she started stomping off towards the hotel again. "Come on," she snapped. "I'm going to need your help smashing up the dresser."

End Part Eleven


	12. Chapter 12

Part Twelve

It was just before dawn when they returned to Matilda's house. They had each taken time to shower and change clothes, though Bonnie's hands had been shaking so badly as she had handled the bottles that she didn't know how much good she was actually doing. She would have been perfectly content to storm right up Matilda's porch barefoot and in the remains of a dress that looked like something Fae Ray had worn while King Kong was dragging her up the side of the Empire State building, mud, blood, and all. Her hair was still slightly damp, and it crackled when she moved as if she were standing near to a fire. Damon had apparently picked up a sense of self-preservation from the convenience store, as he was saying little and staying out of her way, though there was a glitter in his eyes that made Bonnie think he was turning over a few rages issues of his own. As she recalled, he didn't handle betrayal very well.

They had stopped by the parking garage that sat across the street from Cameo on the way, each of them carrying a stake even though Bonnie thought that she had fire enough to suffice against anything that got in the way and Damon moving with a slinky, lithesome stalk that didn't even attempt to be human. Her Prius was gone. Neither of them had been surprised.

Bonnie raised her hand to Matilda's door and ignored the discolored brass knocker altogether so that she could pound her fist against the wood instead. Damon leaned back against one of the porch's support beams, arms folded over his chest, eyes heavy-lidded. They could have simply broken in, but Bonnie wanted Matilda to know why they were there. She wanted her to _know_.

It still took Matilda such a long time to answer that Bonnie was on the verge of yanking her foot back and giving the door a good, solid kick followed by letting Damon simply break it in altogether. It finally swung open just as Bonnie was about to tell Damon to get down with his destructive self. Matilda's hair was in a slight disarray and she was blinking a little rapidly as she looked back and forth between the two of them. Oh, damn, they had disturbed her at bedtime, look at how very sorry Bonnie felt about that.

"What the hell?" Matilda asked, addressing Bonnie rather than the wolf that Bonnie was choosing to keep at bay for the moment. She looked her up and down and seemed to realize that Bonnie was not in a playful mood, at least, because her body language became slightly more wary. "Great, you survived. I'm super-duper thrilled, I really am. But didn't I tell you not to come here again?"

"As it turns out," Bonnie said, spitting each word as if it were one of the bullets that still would have done absolutely nothing to stop what Matilda was. And she had actually thought that maybe...it didn't bear following any further. "I'm not really in the mood to honor your requests any more."

"I wasn't aware that respecting my house needed to be a _request_ ," Matilda started in an acid tone, but didn't get a chance to finish. Bonnie stepped to the side without saying a word, so that she was no longer blocking Damon's way. It was all the command that he needed. He was fully-fed again, and he was _fast_. Matilda made a sound somewhere between a yelp and a snarl as Damon collided with her hard and carried her back into the house. Bonnie followed, closing the door quietly behind her and engaging the lock. This was not something for the street to see.

Damon's weight and momentum carried Matilda backwards, across the living room, and into the cherrywood end table that had been holding a lamp two days before. Their collective weight took it down with a tremendous splintering noise, Matilda grunting as a piece of wood dug into her back. Bonnie took a seat in Damon's customary perch on arm of the sofa, folded her own arms across her chest, and watched.

Damon might have been much larger than Matilda, but in vampire terms simple little things like physics didn't mean very much. She got her legs pulled up to her stomach enough to drive them like twin pistons into Damon's abdomen. He flew backwards across the living room and barely caught himself before he would have slapped straight through the stairway bannister and maybe inadvertently staked himself in the process. The impact was still enough to make the house shake; Bonnie looked reflectively out the window and wondered if they should be worrying about the neighbors calling the cops, or if they could be gone again before that became an issue.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," Matilda said as she leapt back up to her feet with one smooth ripple of her body. She had a piece of the ruined end table in her hand.

"Thanks, but I have my own," Damon replied, reaching behind him and producing the stake that he had tucked into the back of his pants before leaving the motel. He glanced Bonnie's way; Matilda followed the gaze.

"So you're still the one in charge of this rodeo?" she asked.

"I have _always_ been the one in charge of this rodeo," Bonnie answered. She settled herself a little more firmly into her perch as Damon charged Matilda again. She ducked and got in a punch to Damon's jaw that knocked his head to the side and nearly took him off his feet altogether. He caught himself on one hand at the last possible second and swept his legs under Matilda's, bringing her down to the floor, too. She rolled away before he could grab her; she and Damon were both moving so fast that Bonnie's eye could barely follow them.

"You know how this is going to end," Damon said easily. "After all, I'm older than you."

"Two years is no reason to get a swelled head," Matilda said. "And maybe I've been doing more over the past century and a half than mooning after a woman who wasn't that into you, anyway." She flicked her eyes Bonnie's way, as if considering using her as a point of attack, only for Damon to dive between the two of them and then hurl her against the fireplace. The brick cracked in a long line that ran all the way up to the ceiling. When Matilda shook her head, drops of blood flew briefly from a cut at the back of her skull and fell down to the carpet. She grabbed for the fire poker and used it first as a blunt weapon against the side of Damon's head, then stabbed him directly in the chest with it while he was still reeling. Bonnie started to leap down from the couch to help, but Damon seized hold of the poker and ripped it out of his chest with a sucking noise, brought it down hard against Matilda's stake-holding hand. There was a loud cracking noise and Bonnie _saw_ Matilda's wrist jerk at an odd and wrong angle, the stake falling to the ground, before it wrenched itself back into position with a noise like grains of rice rubbing together. She lunged for the stake again, but Damon was faster. He grabbed Matilda by the throat and hurled her down against the coffee table hard enough to make the legs wobble before the whole thing decided precariously to hold, raised the stake up to strike. But he still looked to Bonnie first.

Matilda followed his gaze and managed, even though Damon was holding her so tightly that a human would not have been able to breathe, let alone speak, "Guess you are his type, after all."

Bonnie stalked forward and told herself that she was going to control the urge to light the whole house on fire, if for no better reason than because Damon was close enough that the odds of her managing to end Matilda without catching him at the same time were slim. If this was the thing that she had been afraid of since the outset, that she would become so angry that that she would not be able to control it any longer, then she wasn't certain if she had been scared for all of the right reasons or all of the wrong ones. Once she was in the middle, she _liked_ it.

"I want to know why," Bonnie began in a voice that was shaking more than she wanted to acknowledge. Matilda blinked a few times in seeming confusion, and that made Bonnie even angrier. "I want to know how the hell you could say to my face that a member of my family had meant everything to you, and then turn right around and sell us out to a bunch of vampires."

Matilda started to speak and then gagged as whatever air that she had been carrying in reserve in her lungs apparently ran out. She got one hand up and clawed a long furrow down Damon's face, missing his eyes only because he jerked his head to the side at the very last second. She got in a blow to his abdomen that broke ribs with force that Bonnie could hear from where he stood as the cuts closed up without leaving a mark behind.

"You want to get your catharsis out of the way, Bonnie, you had better do it quick," Damon growled at her. His eyes were flashing from black to blue and back again as if she were looking into a mood ring.

"Loosen up and let her speak," Bonnie ordered him. "I want to hear what she has to say for herself."

Damon's face expressed every different kind of idiot that he was calling her without him needing to say even a word, but he did as she said just far enough for Matilda to croak out, "What the fuck are you talking about?"

The temperature in the room shot up so hard and so fast that Bonnie herself reeled back, and Damon winced, unable to back away without letting go of Matilda entirely. "No one else knew that we were going to be at Cameo but you," Bonnie said in an even voice, much calmer than she actually felt. "We were ambushed and nearly killed." Matilda looked her up and down, obviously noting the lack of wounds, and Bonnie felt herself flushing even though Matilda could not possibly know the trade that she and Damon had done to make that possible. "You want to tell me that you had nothing to do with that?"

"I _didn't_!" Matilda started to push herself up from the coffee table only for Damon to slam her right back down again, and they snarled at each other. Bonnie could see Damon's arm starting to shake from the effort of keeping Matilda in place as Matilda spit up at him, "Either use that thing or put it away, stud."

"Bonnie, wrap up the story time, already," Damon growled at her, but he still wasn't doing the staking until Bonnie expressly told him to.

 _Witches always wind up being pulled into vampire problems._ She hadn't known what her grandmother was talking about, then, and she didn't think that it made all that much of a practical difference now to point out that her vampire had been pulled into a witch problem rather than the other way around. "Damon, let her up," Bonnie said.

"Funny, I don't recall you hitting your head," Damon answered without moving to obey, staring down at Matilda. She glared defiantly back.

" _Damon_." He looked at her. "Let her up."

There was a long, long moment in which she thought that Damon was going to tell her to go fuck herself and end this little dance that they had been doing so well before he slowly, slowly lifted his hand from Matilda's throat and stepped away, stake still in hand. Both of their eyes were glittering like cold stones. Matilda straightened up from the coffee table with a snake's lithesome grace and turned towards Bonnie immediately. Bonnie didn't need Damon to step in front of her; she kept her hands dangling by her sides, raised the temperature of the room fifteen degrees in the time that it took her to blink, and let a long, level stare be her answer.

Matilda didn't seem just terribly intimidated. "You have a _lot_ of nerve, little girl," she said, baring her teeth. The edges of her fangs protruded just slightly over her lower lip even though her eyes and face remained normal.

"That's becoming a thing with me," Bonnie answered. She stood her ground without flinching while Matilda got inches from her face, staring at her so hard that Bonnie half-thought that an attempt at compulsion was going to be following within the next few seconds, while Damon remained on the opposite side of the room and watched with a hooded expression.

"You really think that I would just sell you out to a pack like that?" Matilda asked her, not backing up any more than Bonnie was. Her voice was, for as much as Bonnie hadn't had nearly the time to learn her special language the way that she had Damon's, more hurt than angry or frightened.

"I think that I know what you are," Bonnie said flatly, with much more certainty in her voice than she would have been able to manage if she had been telling the truth. Stefan, fine, he was Elena's guy and was an easy case, Damon was a harder one but still seemed willing to abide by rules so long as he liked the person doing the enforcing (and because he liked the enforcement), Matilda she had known for only a few hours out of a span of two days, and this was...Bonnie was almost glad that she had been able to look into the eyes of at least one vampire that had absolutely nothing and no one standing behind them, just so that she would still know what was real.

Bonnie reached out, grabbed the back of Matilda's neck, and yanked her even closer, so that they could have been kissing if Bonnie had been so inclined. Matilda startled and started to lean back; she wasn't used to being out of control, and didn't like it when it was thrust upon her. From the corner of her eye, Bonnie noticed Damon shifting his weight from one foot to the other before he settled again. Vampire physiology being what it was, it was barely more than a ripple, and not something that she would have noticed a week before.

"If you are lying to me," Bonnie told Matilda in a voice that brooked no disagreement and seemed to come from someone completely other than herself, "I will make absolutely certain that it ain't pleasant, how you go." Another ripple from Damon. Bonnie deliberately did not look.

Matilda matched her, gaze for gaze. "I ever come after you, Bennett witch," she said slowly. For the first time, the webbing of veins re-made her face. "And you will know what unpleasant is."

Bonnie let go of Matilda's neck a half-second before she was sensing that Matilda was about to pull away from her. "Just so long as we understand each other. Here's how it goes," she said, "and tell me if you disagree." A glance over Matilda's shoulder towards Damon. Bonnie swore that she was not raising the heat in the room, this time. "I need to attack a nest of vampires who already have to be figuring that I'm coming, what with not finding a pile of ash and a corpse in that well when the sun went down. Best way to do that is in the daylight, when they're vulnerable."

"Slight problem there, babe." Damon was closer than Bonnie remembered him being a second before. Didn't matter how long she hung around vampires, she didn't think that she was ever going to be used to them doing that. "You might be strong, but you are not strong enough to go up against and nest alone, and I--" The corners of Damon's mouth twitched, close enough to a smile for government work if Bonnie didn't focus too hard on the fact that she could see his fangs pressing against his lower lip for a moment. "Am strictly on the bench until the sun goes down."

"Then I'll just have to fix that, won't I," Bonnie said, not allowing it to be a question, even though she was certain that Elena and Grams would have both taken her by the shoulders and given her a good, hard shake if they had been there with her. Even Damon looked as though he were considering it, and Matilda was leaning back and watching Bonnie with her head cocked slightly to one side, eyes cool and considering.

"My ring was spelled by Emily Bennett," Damon said. "You're tough, Bonnie, but I knew her, and you aren't anywhere near to drinking from the same well."

"The directions are in her spell book," Bonnie argued, trying not to let herself be insulted. She wouldn't get mad if someone told her matter-of-factly that she couldn't levitate, either, except...that she kind of thought she might be able to, someday. "Witches...lots of things can fuel a witch's power, Grams told me. Anger, worry. We both know that I have plenty of one of those things." And not a small amount of the second, which both vampires in the room could probably detect just fine, but they were about a week too late for Bonnie to start letting that stop her. Her life had certainly been simpler months before, when she had worried mostly about whether or not Elena was ever going to come out from under her gray cloud, what Caroline was going to do next that was somehow going to end in Bonnie running interference while she scrambled to extricate herself, and just what the hell kind of vibe she was giving off that made her so invisible to all of the remotely attractive guys in Mystic Falls.

"Was that right before she used so much power that she had an aneurysm?" Damon asked. Bonnie sucked in her breath hard and raised her hand, whether to just slap him or to magically hurl him straight through the walls of Matilda's house she honestly wasn't sure, until she realized that Damon was _worried_. That was almost as big a shock as finding out that vampires existed in the first place.

Bonnie took a deep breath, and then another, until she was certain that she could be calm again before she held up a finger of warning. "You get one. I might not be Emily, but I'm not nothing. I can do this. I know that I can."

"Emily wasn't the only Bennett who was capable of that kind of magic," Matilda said, startling Bonnie with the reminder of her presence. She looked over and discovered that Matilda had stepped back several paces, the better to be out of the way if Bonnie and Damon should really start throwing down. Probably a good idea. "June didn't want to be turned, she was...very adamant about that, but she wanted to give me a parting gift. She died first."

Bonnie closed her eyes, counted to ten, and then said to Damon, "I would ask if there were _any_ of your kind who knew how to just be freaking monsters, already, but I think I met him earlier. Okay. Fine. See, this is totally something that I can do."

"June Bennett was going to attempt the spell, she never actually completed it," Damon snapped back at her. _Holy crap,_ Bonnie thought, looking at his face, _I really think that he might be about to beg me not to do this._ It shouldn't have been shocking, realizing that Damon Salvatore was capable of emotions just like a real boy after she had been traveling with him for this long...except that it really kinda was. _I am the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water. Ribbit._ Bonnie nearly missed the last part, as it Damon gave Matilda a smile dark and glittering. "And how did June die, anyway?"

"Liver cancer, you presumptuous prick," Matilda shot right back. Bonnie thought that she was going to have to step between them for a second as each rose onto the balls of their feet before settling back down.

"Damon?" Bonnie waited until he was giving her his full attention before she went on. "Just so we're clear, this is me explaining, not me asking."

Damon swore underneath his breath. "And if I don't want to have any part of it? I don't trust Elena not to go diving into some dark magic of her own if I take your lifeless corpse back, even if she has to pay someone else to do it."

"Yeah, those are your sole motivations." Damon made a face at her while the first rosy glow of a new dawn started to creep through Matilda's living room windows. She noticed it at the same time that Bonnie did and, swearing, rushed forward to pull the drapes.

"I went almost thirty years without any witch trouble before you showed up on my doorstep," she said over her shoulder to Bonnie, "and now I'm nearly forgetting about the goddamned _sun_ , you've messed everything up so much." Matilda shook out her hand where a ray had become strong enough burn, though the blisters were sucked back down into the skin again almost as soon as they arose.

"Funny. My grandmother said that it was always witches being pulled down into vampire trouble." Bonnie turned her attention back to Damon and went on in a voice that would have been private if they had both been human, carefully ignoring Matilda as Matilda pretended not to hear in return, "No safe words necessary on this trip. You don't want to go any further, you can walk, no questions asked."

"Right." Damon swore again before he seized up Bonnie's hand with a speed which belied the light, gentlemanly kiss that he put on the back of her knuckles before he let her go. "I still owe you the one, and I want my fucking ring back. Go on, Icarus, let's just hope that you know what you're doing."

"Making it up as I go along hasn't failed me yet." Bonnie hesitated, then placed her hand gently against the side of Damon's neck for a moment before she headed for the door. "I'll be back soon. Remember, if you kill each other before I get back, I'm not going to be doing any spells for anyone."

Damon had left the motel room shortly before they had left to find Matilda again and had returned with a new car, this one complete with keys. Bonnie was choosing not to ask any other questions than that under the umbrella that they were leaving each stolen car exactly as they had found it. (She would find a way to get some money to the owner of the truck to cover the little matter of that bullet hole, even if he had made it while doing his best to put a bullet into _her_.) She still tensed up everything time that another car passed her, certain that they were going to turn out to be an undercover cop listening to their police radio at exactly the wrong time.

Grams had had a few supplies. So had Kayla and Aunt Pamela. Bonnie knew exactly what they would have said to her if she had been forced to explain what she wanted and why, though, even if she hadn't only come up with the idea a bare hour before. In a strange city where she couldn't tell the real from the poseurs, Bonnie had to rely on luck and let the strength of the pot smell tell her whether she was dealing with legitimates or fakes. It was fourth store before she found a place that didn't send her reeling straight back out again with the sickly-sweet reek, even if the girl behind the counter wasn't much for confidence right away. She had straw-colored hair looped into a wild configuration of braids that Bonnie really hoped she didn't have to redo every day and skin so pale that Bonnie stood wary in the doorway for several seconds, uncertain that she wasn't dealing with a vampire somehow until the girl finally realized that someone had come inside and jumped in an unmistakably human way.

"Oh, Jesus--! That damned bell, I swear to God." Bonnie looked up and noticed that the brass bell above the door was conspicuously missing its knocker. "I keep meaning to get it fixed, but, you know, rent has a way of taking priority." She hurried around the counter, revealing a brightly colored broom skirt in wine and orchid below her tank top and, as she got close, gray eyes that looked as if they watered a lot.

It took Bonnie that long for both of the oaths that the girl had blurted out to catch up with her. "Um," she said, and pointed as discretely as possible towards a large wheel of the year hanging off the back wall, made of many different colors of wood fitted together and then polished to a high shine.

The girl blushed, giving her so eerie an impression of an opal changing color that Bonnie wondered if she hadn't been wrong about the whole humanity assumption. "I grew up Baptist," she said. "It runs deep, sometimes. What I can I do for you?"

"I need lapis lazuli, among other things," Bonnie said. "Preferably in a piece of jewelry."

"Stone of the dead, right on," the girl said, nodding enthusiastically. "Here's all of our stuff, we have a really nice bracelet that just came in." She led Bonnie over to the counter where she had been reading a magazine before Bonnie had startled her so, which itself held rows and rows of silver rings, necklaces and bracelets. The piece that she pointed Bonnie towards was made for a woman, though, the nearly violent blue of the lapis lazuli broken in a two-one-two pattern by the much more delicate green of amazonite. Bonnie gave it a quick once-over and thought that there was enough of the stone there, but it was too small to fit around Damon's wrist. Nothing else in the jewelry case even contained a speck of what she needed, though her eye was continually drawn back to a large and nearly garish silver ring fastened in the shape of a wolf's head. The animal had been designed in a watchful expression rather than the snarling one that Bonnie would have expected, the holes for its eyes drilled so deep that she wondered how old it was and if they had not once held some kind of stone.

"Do you have anything that would fit a man?" she asked, leaning back from the case. "It's for my boyfriend."

The girl made a clicking sound with her tongue against the back of her teeth and shook her head. "Sorry, that's all we have. Don't get a whole lot of requests for lapus lazuli in men's jewelry, you know, mostly it's women wanting something to make sure he stays faithful, all of that."

"Star sixty-nine is a hell of a lot cheaper than jewelry, then," Bonnie said. "It can't be anything other than lapis lazuli. Do you have any raw stone?"

The girl shifted and looked at Bonnie askance. "Does your boyfriend, like, work in an ER or something?"

"No, he...has a thing about blood," Bonnie said. "Why?"

"Wouldn't have figured anyone to be so adamant about carrying the stone of the dead unless they had a really good reason for it, is all," the girl said, shrugging, though Bonnie noticed that she was being watched much more closely now. "Sure, I have some. Come on." She lead Bonnie away from the jewelry case and towards a far back corner of the store, where it seemed that the light was subtly encouraged not to venture by means that Bonnie could not quite put her finger on. Whereas the items at the front of the store had been pretty pieces of New Age fluff, here there was power, even if it was still carefully disguised so that tourists wandering through still couldn't get themselves into too much trouble. Bonnie spotted a sparkling clean athame set carefully into a case behind a counter, a dowsing rod whose tips were dark with something very old.

The girl opened up a drawer in an old dresser that looked as if it should smell like lavender sachet and rummaged, finally came up with a ragged blue stone that she placed into the center of Bonnie's palm. "Will that work for you?" she asked, while Bonnie hefted it and considered. It was twice again as large as her thumb and a darker blue than it would have been if the stone had been worked, nearly clotted. Could work for her, could work against her; Emily had mentioned polishing the stones for the jewelry herself, when Bonnie had brought herself to look into the very back of the spell book, and putting some of herself into them as she worked. But untouched stones could be very powerful, too. It was all a balancing act.

"This will work," Bonnie finally said. She flipped her hair back over her shoulder. "I'll also need rainbow fluorite, black onyx, and pietersite." _Many things can influence a witch's power._ "And rosemary. A lot of rosemary."

She was definitely being watched in a different way now. "Of course," the girl murmured, returning to the dresser that Bonnie was willing to bet no tourists ever got to see more as a slightly charming, slightly trashy antique. The gray eyes didn't look watery as she turned around again. "You know, I can't take credit cards or checks or shit like that."

"I have cash." Bonnie followed the girl back to the front counter and could not stop herself from looking at the amazonite bracelet again, the silver ring. "And those, too," she said, pointing.

The girl was wearing a carefully blank expression as she selected the two pieces of jewelry and wrapped them up with the rest of Bonnie's packages. "Since you're all over lapis lazuli, I'm just going to assume that you're already down with amazonite," she said, swatting back one of her braids as it fell down in front of her eyes and ruined the solemn air that she had likely been going for.

"Encouragement of honor and integrity," Bonnie said, laying the necessary bills out on the counter.

"And romantic love."

"I'm putting a stronger emphasis on the first two." Bonnie started to gather up her packages and turn away, only for the girl to put her hand quickly on her arm. The power that flowed from her into Bonnie was nothing compared to what Bonnie was sending back, and they both knew it right away.

"Whoa." The girl drew her hand back and shook out her fingers as if Bonnie had burned her. "I was going to tell you to watch your ass if you were going to go combining lapis and amazonite, but I have a feeling that you already know."

Bonnie smiled a thin smile. "It's kind of a family thing," she said before she exited, the bell above the door as silent at her departure as it had been upon her arrival.

End Part Twelve


	13. Chapter 13

Part Thirteen

It was getting gloomy as Bonnie pulled up in front of Matilda's house again. She squinted up at the sky that was making promises without quite yet delivering upon them and muttered a few obscenities under her breath. If she wound up giving herself brain damage doing this damned thing and then it wound up raining so hard that it wasn't needed in the first place, she was going to be _pissed._ Bonnie leveled a warning finger at the sky as she got out and slammed the door shut behind her, dropping it quickly back down to her side when the sky rumbled back in return. Not even Emily could control the weather, from everything that the grimoire and family legends had told her, but it was still probably best not to go pointing her finger at something unless she meant to use it.

On the porch, it was Damon who swung the door open for her before she could knock. Bonnie noticed that his eyes went immediately to the bag in her arms and wondered if he could feel the stone inside, if it pulled him even before she had had a chance to do anything with it. It must be a bitch of a time to be a vampire in a New Age store if that were the case. The bracelet Bonnie was already wearing upon her own wrist; it was funny when Damon actually tried to control his eye-rolling impulses, because his whole face twitched with the effort.

"That's just mean," Damon said, tapping lightly at the bracelet and then holding onto her wrist a bit longer than was necessary in order to pull her into the house. He muttered something impolite as a bit of sunlight struck his hand and was still strong enough to burn even through the cloud cover.

"Maybe I wanted to feel pretty," Bonnie said. Matilda was on the far side of the room, a mug in her hand that Bonnie wasn't going to examine too closely. She was watching the bracelet around Bonnie's wrist, too, but Bonnie was careful to keep her face still. "Yours isn't quite so flattering, sorry." She pulled the chunk of lapis lazuli from the bag and tossed it to him.

Damon turned the stone over in his hands and lifted an eyebrow at her. "You know that this is supposed to be jewelry, right?"

Bonnie huffed. "That was what they had. I don't know what kind of timeline Emily was working under--" Unless the reports of Katherine had been greatly exaggerated, it couldn't have been a lax one, though. "But I'm not going to learn jewelry-making just so that it can fit your specifications. We'll duct-tape it to your stupid chest if we have to." Damon tossed the stone into the air, caught it, and then gave her the infuriating smile which meant that she was being exactly the kind of cranky that amused him so much. "Shut up and take this." She dug the silver ring out of the bag and got to watch vampire reflexes at work as Damon flipped the lapis lazuli into the air, snatched the ring from beneath it, and then caught the stone again before it had fallen any lower than his waist, let alone managed to hit the ground.

"How sweet," Damon said in a dry tone, examining it. "You do know that I'm not the marrying type, right?"

"As if you would get any further than my front door before my dad was meeting you with a shotgun." Damon flashed her a wicked smile. "Oh, don't pretend you wouldn't ask to make it all nice and _proper_ first. You're not as edgy about a lot of things as you like to pretend, Damon Salvatore."

She leaned forward rather than away when he was suddenly in her face like that now. "You know, most people figure out quick that playing a game of opposites with me isn't smart."

Oh, look, her hand had found its way into its customary place against Damon's chest again. "Guess I'm not most people. Consider it a token of thanks. Besides, it suits you."

Damon examined the watchful wolf's head with more focus than anyone had likely given the ring since it had been forged in the first place, his expression wrought too carefully blank for even Bonnie to read. "Suppose it does," he said, and slipped it onto his finger.

"Can we just get this done already?" Matilda interrupted, making Bonnie step back from Damon as if she had been caught out in the middle of doing something wrong. Matilda had her arms folded across her chest and was tapping her fingers restlessly against her elbow, as close to bubbling over with emotion as Bonnie guessed a vampire ever got. "This is starting to feel an awful lot like the last time the two of you had a moment in my house, ran off to do battle, and then came back to kill me for something that I didn't even do."

 _You're a vampire, don't tell me that suspicion is something new to you._ Bonnie sealed her lips shut around the words before they could escape. If there was one thing that she ought to have learned by now, no matter how much it really, really sucked and she wished that she could just go back to the days of point-shoot-fireball, it was that things weren't always what they seemed. For all that she knew, Matilda drank from live and unwilling humans no more than Stefan did and just supported herself through an uncanny instinct for the stock market rather than a generational family fortune.

"I'll be out of your space just as soon as I can manage it, trust me," Bonnie said. "This hasn't been pleasant for me any more than it has been for you."

Matilda roved her gaze across Bonnie's face long enough to make Bonnie shiver, because the eyes really were the only thing that she had spotted of herself in all pictures of her great-grandmother, and then twitched as if she were shaking off a fly. Matilda's stare was blanker and more predatory by the time that she had finished; it might have made Bonnie more on edge if she hadn't so recently been acquainted with vampires who did it all the time rather than on occasion.

"I doubt that," Matilda answered finally. "Do whatever you have to do in the kitchen, not on the hardwood."

Matilda's kitchen was as old as the rest of the house, save for a gleaming refrigerator that Bonnie saw no reason to open and take a peek inside, um, ever. The appliances didn't have the air of carefully kept mementos from years gone by that Matilda's living room did, though. Bonnie didn't think that they had even been touched since Matilda had purchased the house in the first place.

"Don't deal with humans often, do you?" she asked as she knelt down on the cool tile floor and began setting out the crystals and the rosemary in careful patterns. The smell of the latter soon filled with kitchen with a scent that was probably closer to cooking than it had ever experienced before. No table, so Bonnie had plenty of room to do what she needed to do.

Matilda and Damon remained in the doorway. When Bonnie glanced back over her shoulder to await Matilda's answer, she saw that Damon had his arms folded over his chest and his head cocked to one side, expression curious and sharp. For all of the magic that he ran on, around, and with, Bonnie wondered how much he had actually seen performed firsthand. Matilda mostly just looked as if the sun doing battle with the clouds outside was the only thing that kept her from finding an elsewhere to be just as fast as her legs would carry her.

"Not so much," Matilda answered. "I've found that it's much simpler this way."

 _So sorry for complicating up your life,_ Bonnie thought, unsure if she was being sarcastic or not. She took a moment to center herself and then flipped rapidly through Emily's grimoire, looking for the correct place. The spell that had made the charms of immunity for Katherine and her friends had been one of the very last ones that Emily had designed in her life, or perhaps one that she had had a deep feeling that she would regret and had so hidden it away until one had to be devotedly looking in order to find it. It was on one of the very last pages of the book, and Emily's normally firm, sure hand was so faint that Bonnie had to lean down and squint to make certain that she was reading correctly under the outdated lights. More than once there was a splotch on the parchment, as if Emily had stopped in the middle of a thought in order to compose the next one or ask herself if she really wanted to continue the current. Bonnie read over the spell three times, making certain that she wasn't moving her lips (Aunt Pamela had an area rug that was never going to be the same; lesson learned), before she was certain that she was ready.

"Don't go plunging into anything that you can't handle, witch," Damon cautioned her from the doorway.

"I don't want to wind up down a well with you again," Bonnie said. Matilda made a soft snorting noise.

"That's not a euphemism," Damon said to her. "We really were down a well. Also, we're fucking."

"Trust me, Salvatore, you are only of the last people in the world that I would expect to have a delicate tongue."

Bonnie turned around and leveled a warning finger at Damon before he could answer, though that didn't wipe away his expression of clearly wanting to. She concentrated hard on the blues and greens of the bracelet encircling her wrist, the properties of the amazonite in particular, and then started reciting a jumbling tumble of words in a language that had the syntax of Latin but wasn't, and no one in the family had any idea where Emily had learned it, whether her teachers had even been living or dead. For all intents and purposes, she was the starting point of the line, the flame that everyone else was reflecting.

While Bonnie continued to recite and did her very best to block the audience at her back from her mind, she kept her gaze focused on the green. People were allowed to have more than one motivation at a time, Damon had told her, and maybe that was even true, but in magic concentration was everything. People came to ugly ends when they tried to harness dark forces with equally dark intent. So Bonnie watched the green, and did her best not to acknowledge the deep blue stones that ringed it at all.

She wasn't certain how far in she had gone, certainly no more than a phrase or two, when the pressure in the room began to change, get thicker. The air stopped smelling like rosemary and started smelling like ozone and earth, a sharp and unsettling scent. Bonnie started breathing a little faster and hoped that the two vampires at her back would be smart enough to give her space of her own accord, because something down deep in her gut was telling her that this was not a magic that would welcome the dead, no matter how much it might benefit them in the end. The world became _more_ somehow, the gray-green of the rosemary and the lines in the grout that Matilda clearly paid indifferent attention to at best becoming so bright that they hurt Bonnie's eyes, and she couldn't look at her bracelet any more at all. A second after that, she had to shut her eyes entirely and found that that did little to help when her sense of hearing was being amplified by the web that she was drawing around herself, her sense of smell. She had touched lightly at a vampire's senses when she had taken those few mouthfuls of Damon's blood the previous day, but she thought that she could blow him away if they were to be laid side by side right about now.

 _A witch's power can be amplified by many things._ She loved Grams, her father, Elena and Caroline. These were bright emotions, untainted, and the more that she focused on them the more powerful she could feel the force reverberating out of her becoming. She was not doing this to hurt. She was not doing this for revenge. She didn't know what would come crawling out of the pit for her if she did.

Someone said something behind Bonnie, and she thought that the timbre of the voice was male, but she couldn't even think about breaking concentration long enough to look around, let alone consider the ramifications to the spell if she were to do so. There was a pressure in her chest that felt as if someone or something was inside with her and struggling to get out, frightening at first until she remembered that she had been possessed before and the two experiences didn't even begin to compare.

Caroline. Elena. Her dad. Grams. Stopping a nest of vampires before they hurt anyone else because they thought that people were simply disposable like that. These were all good things to concentrate upon. Bonnie focused so hard that the world seemed to disappear even though she had her eyes closed and couldn't see where it was going, and she missed the sweet smell of the rosemary abruptly turning acrid and burnt. Something brushed against her mind, and she caught a whiff of perfume that she had known since childhood.

Bonnie discovered where the world had gone when she abruptly tumbled back down into it, opening her eyes and yelping. Someone tried to catch her from behind, before they swore and leapt back, leaving her to fall the rest of the way back down to the tile and just barely avoid cracking her head. It was a male voice, and she would have known that particular flavor of obscenity anywhere.

She stayed on her back, gasping, as she wasn't certain that she was going to up to the task of sitting just yet, and craned her head to bring Damon into view instead. He was holding his hands out from his body, palms up like a supplicant. Bonnie caught sight of reddened skin that waited several seconds longer than it should to start healing, considering what he was. Matilda was standing several feet back from him looking as if she was seriously weighing the pros and cons of taking her chances with the sun rather than staying near the kitchen and whatever it was that Bonnie had just done.

"Did I do that?" Bonnie asked, staring at Damon's hands.

Damon shook the last of the lobster-redness out of the tips of his fingers and answered, "Bonnie, you were _glowing._ " She didn't think that he meant of the "with happiness" variety, either.

"Oh." Bonnie stayed on her back for a few more seconds until she was certain that her head could handle it, then slowly pushed herself up onto her elbows. Her whole body felt tired and battered, but in a pleasant way, as if she had just had...as if she had just had herself a truly _excellent_ time that may or may not have necessitated being vertical. Bonnie touched her tingling face and then pushed a few strands of hair behind her ears, not looking at Damon.

The rosemary was gone, leaving only in its place ash in the pattern where she had laid it out, and probably some truly spectacular scorch marks underneath that. The chunk of lapis lazuli that Bonnie had been attempting to spell didn't appear harmed, but the other stones... "Holy crap," Bonnie breathed. She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and inched forward when that didn't make her wobble too badly so that she could examine the bases of each one where they appeared to have _melted_ slightly, and required prying before she could get them up from Matilda's floor. Bonnie rubbed at her wrist and then plucked up the chunk of lapis lazuli, the only of the stones that had come through the smell undamaged. She flipped it through the air towards Damon. "See how that fits you."

Damon shoved the stone into his pocket with a casualness that left Bonnie feeling slightly piqued-- _hey, did you not see me apparently turning myself into a lightbulb in order to pull that off_ \--so that he could come forward and take Bonnie beneath the arms instead. Just when she was worried that he was going to go too far into his self-described chivalric fantasies, she was half a second later nervous that he was going to toss her over his shoulder just to make certain that he took the charm and the source at the same time. Would really suck if she had failed and he dropped her on her face while bursting into flames, then. Damon flopped her down on her rear on the top of the kitchen island, holding his hand out with mock-care in case she should fall until she flipped him off, and then headed for Matilda's back door. Bonnie craned her neck as far as she could, not quite certain that her legs were going to hold her yet. If this went wrong...

Damon pulled the lapis lazuli out of his pocket and, tensing slightly, opened the back door to put his other hand out into the light. There was a distinct lack of anything dramatic, exactly as it should have been, and Bonnie sighed so hard with relief that she nearly fell off of the counter. Damon caught the tail end of the reaction as he was coming back.

"That was a vote of confidence," he said. "Thought you were certain that you had this down."

"Haven't you ever heard of bravado?" Bonnie hopped down from the counter and was proud of herself for wobbling only a little. Her sneakered foot came down in the rosemary ashes. "Um, sorry about your floor?"

"If I tell you not to worry about it will you be gone for good this time?" Matilda asked. She was still looking at Bonnie in that weird way that made Bonnie think she was really just a photograph into the past for Matilda rather than a girl in her own right; maybe June had looked like that while she was doing magic, too.

"Probably?" Matilda didn't look impressed. "I'm learning to stop talking in absolutes, they only turn around and bite me in the ass later." There was a sudden rush of noise as the clouds opened up and started spilling down the rain that they had been promising for hours. "Oh, come _on._ " Her brain still felt like tapioca pudding, she was going to be mad as hell if it turned out that they hadn't needed an extra piece of lapis lazuli, after all.

"I'd still be worrying about one stray beam coming through, not to mention that I'm not a fan of the hoodie look," Damon said. He started for the door.

"Where are you going?" Bonnie demanded.

"Did that spell give you brain damage? I'm going to kill some vampires."

"Not without me you're not." Bonnie stormed across the kitchen and was stopped by Damon putting his hand against her chest in the exact same gesture of warning and warding off that had become their signature. There wasn't enough "bitch, please" in the whole world to fill the look that Bonnie shot him, but she didn't see him backing away, either. She wasn't sure whether she wanted to make him pay now or later.

"Can you even levitate a feather right now?" Damon asked her.

"Do you really want to test what I can still do?"

"Sorry, sweetheart, but that doesn't work right after you admitted to being very brave and full of shit." Bonnie took Damon's wrist and let a subtle pulse of heat slide along his skin, just hot enough to walk the line between discomfort and pain. He dropped his hand. "Point taken."

"I'm just saying. Look, I have to do this, for people and puppies and all of the things that are making you want to upchuck your blood right now." That was a very expressive blankness that he was wearing, right there. "And a little bit because I still want to make some vampires hurt, but we already had the 'people are complicated' conversation, didn't we? You don't have to go, you have a piece of charmed lapis lazuli to go have another ring made."

"Doesn't work that way," Damon said. "Anyone tries to alter the stone now, it will...removing its protective capabilities will probably be the least dramatic thing that happens."

Bonnie had been learning pieces of Emily's personality ever since she had started studying the woman's choices in spell work, but she was more and more wishing that she could find a personal journal somewhere within the family heirlooms. She had a feeling that the founding member of the Bennett line could have out-strategized Sherman if she had been given a chance. She shrugged. "You still don't have to go. I'll give your ring back to you if I can get it." Bonnie leaned forward. "Damon, in case you've started thinking in any way that I need to ask your permission in this shindig, I should probably remind you that _I'm_ supposed to be the one with the head injury."

"Then I won't point out to you how much you looked like Katherine right about then." Damon dropped his hand and made a big show of ushering Bonnie ahead of him, but not before she caught him looking faintly disturbed as he made the connection.

 _Not hardly,_ Bonnie thought. _I might use you, but I won't use you up. Big difference between us._ She satisfied herself with making a face at him and said only, "Point being permission, and the fact that I don't ask for it from you."

"Do you even know where you need to go?"

"We wouldn't have been dumped far from the nest, so it's got to be around the restoration site," Bonnie said simply. "They would have wanted to race back and see their handiwork as soon as the sun set." She smiled sweetly when Damon looked annoyed. "Aw, did you think that you were having a big insight with that one?" He made only a disgusted noise and gestured her ahead of him again, but Bonnie paused long enough to throw a look back over her shoulder at Matilda, who was leaning up against the kitchen doorway and looking more forlorn than she probably would have liked to hear.

"Thank you for everything that you've done to help us," Bonnie said, meaning it. "Really."

Matilda stirred and took a step back before she tossed her hair. "I almost wish that I could go with you," she said. "Prove Sheila wrong about me if nothing else."

Bonnie thought about the whiff of perfume that had, for the slightest of moments, been strong enough to overwhelm the smell of burning. "Who knows? She actually kind of liked being proven wrong."

End Part Thirteen


	14. Chapter 14

Part Fourteen

No one was foolish enough to forget his or her stake, not this time. Bonnie shifted a little in the passenger seat of the car that she was still really, really hoping that Damon hadn't stolen, feeling the tip of it press against her spine. Damon slid her one of his sideways glances.

"If I get killed because your battery isn't charged back up yet, I'm going to be mad as hell," he warned her. "And then I'll have to haunt your pert little ass for eternity, and neither one of us wants that."

Bonnie was still equal parts gratified and completely weirded out by the fact that she was now able to have a conversation with Damon Salvatore in which the threats were mostly playful, she didn't even want to think about having him around her for an eternity. They should at least see how long she could go without smacking him in public first.

"If you get killed, I'm probably going to get killed, too," she pointed out.

"Minor detail. I'm certain that I can still be an effective ghost without being able to physically pull your pigtails."

 _Oh, so that's what you've been doing?_ "It's okay to say that you'll miss me if I'm not there to be cranky at you anymore," Bonnie informed him, watching the windshield wipers as they sluiced through the driving rain. It hadn't let up since they had left Matilda's. Pointing out emotions to Damon Salvatore was like petting a dog that wasn't certain yet whether or not it wanted to be your friend: you had to sidle up on them sideways. "Really. You can even go all medieval and write a sonnet about it or something."

"Sonnets weren't developed until the Renaissance." Damon sounded almost comically disgusted. "Jesus, and I thought that Saltzman had a frontal lobe even if no one else teaching at that school can say the same."

"I'm not in his world history classes, be nice. See, you care about someone enough to be disappointed in them, it's sweet." Bonnie flexed out her fingers against her legs and asked herself if she was running on foolish bravado again and hoping luck would help her, if she really was up to this. Answer from the Magic Eight Ball: try again later. Damn, this had all been so much easier when she had been too angry to care. "I'll be all right, Damon. I know my limits." Frankly, thanks to this little trip, she now knew about her limits in places where she hadn't even known there was pasture, let alone fences.

"Little late to back out now, anyway." It wasn't clear whether Damon was talking it himself or her. The car idled along at a devastatingly slow speed on the back roads and in the bad weather, making Bonnie more twitchy by the moment. So maybe she was overestimating things when she said that she had it all under control.

"This...is going to take us the entire goddamned day," Bonnie muttered, looking through the windshield at the blurry smears of houses through the rain, some set right up on the road and yet others so far back that their shapes had to be sensed at much as seen. If she were a blood-sucking fiend, she wouldn't want to have a house that encouraged people to run up and try to sell Girl Scout cookies...or maybe she would. "Ew."

"I'm not even going to ask what's offended your moral sensibilities this time." Damon was hunched over the steering wheel and staring as hard as she was, but his enhanced senses didn't seem to be doing him all that much good. "Look for a foreclosure sign."

"What? Why? They have enough resources to control a club, I don't think that they're lacking for nest eggs."

"They don't control that club with money, Bonnie," Damon answered, so...okay, not the creepiest thing that she had heard all day, but definitely in the top ten. Bonnie shivered and hoped that killing all of the vampires responsible for the compulsion would be enough to free the people stuck inside their bodies like that. "Just keep an eye out, it's an old trick I taught someone that I turned once." Bonnie turned her head to look at him, but he didn't return the stare. "Less judging, more looking."

"Less judging than you think." If she was going to keep...whatevering with Damon, then it wasn't fair to constantly judge him for things that had had happened before. _And that doesn't mean that I'm not still totally willing to burn his ass if he does them again._ Bonnie pressed her face so close up against the window that she was nearly leaving nose-smudges against the glass, then yelped triumphantly when she caught a flash of red and white. "There!"

"Atta girl." Damon could pull the car only partway up the dirt driveway before the rain took the wheels and held them fast like glue. His irritable stomping of the gas pedal only made the engine whine and threw up thick clots of mud behind the vehicle which reminded Bonnie way too much of blood shooting out of an artery. He swore, then asked, "Don't suppose any of you Bennetts can control the weather?"

"Not even Emily."

"Well, then." Damon took out the uncut lapis lazuli and turned it between his fingers. "Let's see how far this toy will take me."

"I don't think that you have to have skin to skin contact," Bonnie said uncertainly. There was a band of metal separating Damon and Stefan from the stones proper whenever they were wearing their rings, after all. "I think that it just being on your person will be enough." Damon turned his head slowly to stare at her, and Bonnie flushed. "I'm sorry, but Katherine didn't exactly line up a whole cage full of vampires so that Emily could practice her scientific method, okay?" Knowing what she knew about Katherine, it was more surprising that she hadn't done that, actually.

"Right. Never let it be said that I was afraid of a risk." Damon hesitated for long enough to make Bonnie wonder if he wasn't really blowing smoke up her ass and he actually was nervous, his statements about life being easier to risk when he had already lived so much of it be damned, before he went on. "Bonnie, as much noise as this car is making, they probably already know that we're here."

Oh, for the love of-- Bonnie concentrated on one of the puddles in front of the vehicle, dimly though she could focus on it through the driving rain, and then watched in satisfaction as it became a plume of flame so five feet tall before dying down again.

"And now they definitely know that we're here," Damon went on without a beat. "Good job."

"Shut up and let's do this." Bonnie expected a shock of cold water as she stepped out into the rain, but it was so warm that she half-thought that it was alive, already waiting for her to thread magic through it. She started at a jog towards the house and saw Damon from the corner of her eye zipping around towards the back. Towards what end Bonnie wasn't quite certain yet, except that she didn't think that vampires could sense the presence of one another quite the way that they could a human. She waited to hear screams and things breaking, but there was nothing.

It was a fairly long driveway, and Bonnie's feet were squelching before she made it more than a few steps. Well, they _had_ agreed that stealth was a lost cause before leaving the car. Bonnie slowed to a walk as she approached the house and saw a figure standing on the porch, safely back under the shadow where even the dimmest light wouldn't be able to hurt them. She was too far away just yet to see what color the vampire's eyes were or even tell if it was a man or a woman, but Bonnie still knew and thought that she would have even without the touch of clairvoyance.

"Were you watching us climb out of the well?" Bonnie called to him. She had been right, and he resolved himself into the same vampire who had bitten her as they both came closer to one another. He leaned forward and put his hands against the porch railing without seeming to care that he was bringing the driving rain into his face, Damon's ring clearly visible on his hand. Bonnie felt her face twist and wondered if she could yank it, and maybe the whole fucking hand right along with it, over to her from where she stood. "Did you stay there the whole day hoping that he would snap and feed on me?"

"Or that he would try and you would kill him." As Bonnie got closer, she felt the water falling down into her hair and across her body get slightly warmer, but the vampire on the porch wasn't picking up on those kind of subtleties quite yet.

Scratch that. Vam _pires_. Bonnie noticed a woman gliding back and forth behind the male and staring at Bonnie from beneath muddy-blonde bangs. She had a rangy, overbred look, like a puppy mill hound, and the edges of her nails were raw from constant biting. Bonnie wouldn't guess her to be any more than twenty or so when she had been turned, and probably not much older than that even now. All of her aggression was still human, rather than the effortless animal grace that Bonnie was coming to recognize in vampires who had been around for awhile. The male elbowed her back when she got too close, the closest that he came to acknowledging her existence.

"You're a Bennett, right?" he called down to Bonnie. "You've got their look."

"Nice to know that I'm famous before I even get started." Bonnie hid her hand against her thigh from a moment, snapped her fingers, and felt a brief spark of flame lick against her skin before the next few drops extinguished it away. Oh, yeah. No need to worry about her battery in the slightest.

"There was a Bennett running around here a few decades ago," the male said, shrugging. "You guys sure tend to wind yourselves around vampires, don't you?"

"Other way around." Bonnie started to raise her hands.

"Look, there's not a vampire on the East Coast who doesn't know what you and Salvatore are off doing," the male vampire said, with far too little unease, to Bonnie's mind, to fit someone who was about to be burned alive and then stolen property dug out of his ashes so that it could be returned to the proper owner. "So why are you still fucking around in Miami? What if I told you that I knew exactly where the vampires that you're looking for have gone?"

Bonnie regretted it immediately, but she still couldn't help but lower her hands, just for a second. "You're assuming that it's either-or," she then snapped, and raised them up again. Water was actually easier than alcohol, for reasons that Bonnie had never found explicated in Emily's book and that Pamela and Kayla were both at a loss to explain themselves. Every drop of rain between Bonnie and the vampires at the porch simultaneously burst into flame and ignited the ones above and below them, too, so that a solid wall of fire was racing straight towards the house. Bonnie saw the male vampire shout and then grab for the wrist of the female to drag her out of harm's way in the first display of care that he had shown yet. The nearly broke down the front door in their haste to get inside and out of the way, which was pretty stupid from where Bonnie was standing. After all, any fool could see that she wasn't aiming from the window in the first place. The flames licked along the exposed wood of the porch, leaving orange and yellow glowing in their wake, teased at the edges of the roof and found that to be good homestead, too, and ultimately shot straight through the front window and into the living space beyond. Bonnie only barely heard the sound of the glass breaking over the crackling of the flames; by the time that the fire found its way into the vampires' inner sanctum, it was glowing white.

To stop concentrating so abruptly after that much magic had just poured out of her was like the longest, hardest exhale that a human being could ever take and then some. Bonnie swayed a little bit and then consciously straightened her spine when she caught herself at it. The grass was still smoldering and hot enough to make the bottoms of her sneakers feel slightly sticky as she marched the rest of the way across the lawn, up the porch, and into the house.

The furniture wasn't from the scattered timeline of eras and memories that Matilda had decorated her home with; it was sterile, modern, the kinds of things that a realtor would pick out in a desperate attempt to prove that the old plantation house really could be pulled forward and into the twenty-first century. Bonnie didn't have much time to pause and judge the decor, though, as most of it was being obliterated by the burst of wild fire that she had sent into the house ahead of her. Flames leapt from couch to ottoman like trained pets, all of them under her command even though it was making the tips of her fingers tremble and her heart shudder in a beat that she had never felt before. Bonnie jerked her head to the side so hard that her neck creaked and twinged, bringing the blonde vampire from the porch into view, and pinned her against the wall beside a staircase out of _Gone With the Wind_ will a pillar of pure flame. It ended quickly, Bonnie could say that much for her; she was too high on the anger and the magic for the fire to be anything cooler with a brilliant, nova-searing white.

Just as Bonnie was whirling to find the next vampire, there was a hand against her shoulder, and Damon nearly wound up seared alive by the same fire before Bonnie could catch herself. "Fuck me," he breathed, looking at something within her face that Bonnie could not view without benefit of a mirror and was not certain that she wanted to.

Bonnie let out a short laugh and decided not to press the obvious. "How many?" she asked, and before Damon could answer, "And that blue-eyed bastard?"

"So glad that you're not referring to me." Damon scrutinized Bonnie's face for a second and then leaned down and kissed her hard. Not the time; Bonnie pushed him back.

"Kill vampires now, make out later," she ordered, and was gratified somewhere down deep by watching Damon nod once and then fall back. He was holding a stake; Bonnie had nearly forgotten that she still had one tucked into the back of her jeans at all. There was blood on Damon's knuckles that Bonnie could not tell whether belonged to him or not, as any injury that might have bled them was long gone.

"Two dozen, near as I can tell," Damon said. He was flinching away from the fire that was racing all around them from wall to ceiling, whether he realized it or not, and the air was so hot. Bonnie concentrated again while only barely aware that the reservoir from which she drew was growing more shallow and that she was swaying slightly on her feet. The flames drew back to give them a clear path. Upstairs, Bonnie could hear vampires screaming.

"A dozen, now," she said.

Damon whirled and hurled the stake at a place directly behind Bonnie's ear before she could react, and it wasn't until she turned that she saw a male vampire pinned back against the wall via the shaft of wood in his chest for the barest of moments before her fire took care of the rest of him. "Eleven."

Bonnie wrenched the stake from the vampire's chest with her mind before the flames could render it useless and repeated the trick on another vampire racing down the stairs and towards the front door, hoping to take its chances with the sun. "Ten."

"I love smart women." Damon caught the stake out of the air as Bonnie wrenched it back for him, then deftly reached around her and took the stake that she was carrying out of the waistband of her pants, too. "Since it looks like you're carrying your own weapons as it is."

"The blue-eyed bastard headed out the back," Damon went on. He casually staked a vampire, tossed it into Bonnie's flames, and then tossed it back again when his first strike apparently hadn't gone deep enough to end things and it tried to leap at him. Bonnie finished up by holding it there. It was getting harder to keep the fire back a safe distance, but she barely noticed the beads of sweat running down her spine and making her shirt stick to her skin. Her hands had begun to tremble slightly and in a way that was entirely outside of her control, like coming up for air on the other side of an all-night studying and coffee binge.

"Flip a coin with you for who gets to take him out," Bonnie said, grabbing for Damon's hand and having to satisfy herself with his wrist when that was occupied by stake. She tugged him along willingly in her wake while the fire, finally released from its leash, ate up the rest of the room behind them and then split, one tendril racing up the stairs to the upper stories and the other following along behind Bonnie to see what she could do.

"He took my ring," Damon said, as if that was supposed to end the matter.

"Well, he pissed me off," Bonnie growled right back in a dangerous tone.

"Maybe we can break him like a wishbone, then." She should have been more disturbed to hear Damon talking about violence so casually, and more disturbed to find herself agreeing. Bonnie thought again of the whiff of perfume that she had caught while enchanting the lapis lazuli and said to herself, _This is for you, Grams. These are vampires who don't get to do to anyone else what happened to you and me._ She raced through the kitchen with Damon and watched metal appliances already starting to pop and bow out from the tremendous heat that was following along behind her. The glass exploded out of the front of the microwave and might have blinded them both if they had been in the way.

At the back porch, Bonnie stumbled and grabbed for the railing to steady herself. The moment her fingers touched the water-slicked wood, they stopped being hers and became his instead, cool to the touch from blood no longer needing to flow to animate them, calluses on his fingers and palms from a lifetime of work that had ended decades ago. He had wanted to be a musician--

Bonnie yanked her hand away from the wood as soon as she ascertained where he was headed, not wanting to know anything else that would make him more of a person to her, even his name. She only then realized that Damon had her about the waist and was about to swing up up and into his arms. "I'm good," she said. The window behind her exploded outwards from the heat; Damon shifted them both so that the glass bounced harmlessly off of his back.

"You were somewhere else," he said.

"I'm still good. The son of a bitch is headed towards the restoration site, the well." Damon's lips curved up with the edges of a thought that Bonnie wasn't certain that she wanted to hear. He finished swinging her up and into his arms.

"I'm faster," he said when Bonnie gave him a look.

"Then carry on, steed." She looked behind them once as Damon started to run, saw that the entire house was engulfed in flames that the rain pouring down wasn't even beginning to touch. _I did that._ Pamela and Kayla had never mentioned doing anything that big--

Damon ran so fast that the raindrops striking Bonnie actually became painful, and she didn't even feel the jarring of his gait. She gripped hard at his neck and barely had time to realize that he was carefully tilting his head away from her own before they were entering the wide open space of the restoration site out of the thick trees and he was setting her down on her feet. She didn't wobble before she managed to find them again. She _didn't_.

"Oh," Bonnie said, stumbling back against Damon's chest a little. He put his hands against her waist to steady her. "Is my vision doubling?"

"I doubt it. Do you see about half a dozen pissed-off vampires?"

"Goddamnit." Some were wearing jackets with hoods and some had blankets drawn over their heads to protect them from the weak sunlight; Bonnie saw one vampire with a singed couch cushion held up over her head. The tops of her hands were turning pink and slowly starting to bubble. All of their eyes were blacker than the onyx that she had used for Damon's stone, and their faces looked as if they were wearing Mardi Gras masks. _Fire_ , Bonnie thought. _I want fire_. She concentrated as hard as she could and thought that she smelled smoke, but the rain washed it away without so much as a spark. _Oh, **fuck**_.

"You got this, right?" Bonnie said back over her shoulder to Damon. "'Cause I think that I'm kinda--" She had thought that her balance in the mud was good, but then suddenly her feet weren't under her any more and Damon's hands against her waist were the only things holding her up. He swore so violently that Bonnie was a little surprised not to see the air light ablaze from _that_ and let her go. She dropped to her ass in the mud with a yelp, would have been offended if not for the fact that he was half a second later fending off two vampires at a time, one per stake, and not looking as if he was doing such a good job of it. The blue-eyed bastard turned his head towards Bonnie as if she had a radar beacon glued to her head.

 _Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck._ She hadn't considered the possibility that she might die doing this as she had set out, not really. She _had_ considered the possibility that Damon might and hadn't been able to honestly tell herself that she cared, but that had been then, and now only one of them going back to Mystic Falls and having to face the loved ones of the other was nearly as bad as no one coming back at all. Bonnie propped herself up on her elbows and thought, _Burn you bastard, burn, burn,_ as the blue-eyed son of a bitch leaned over her, but he refused to oblige. Water dropped off of his forehead and onto Bonnie's as he grabbed the front of her shirt and lifted her up. She kicked out as his midsection, struggled to pry open his hand and take Damon's ring back, but it was all like fighting against a Terminator.

"You should have taken me up on my offer," he told her.

"You're not one of the things that I'm second-guessing myself on," Bonnie grunted. Over his shoulder, she saw Damon fall, and then made an aborted sound as the blue-eyed bastard twined his fingers through her hair and wrenched her head to the side so hard that she thought her spine was going to snap. There was no fucking way that she was going to scream for him, not on this earth or in any worlds beyond it.

Something dark blurred in from the side and slammed into the blue-eyed bastard hard, making Bonnie's neck pop in warning yet again as she was suddenly released and dropped to the ground, mud splattering up and into her eyes. She thought that by some miracle Damon had managed to get the better of all of the vampires that he had been fighting and come back for her, but this figure was much too small. She was wearing a dark hoodie and gloves on her hands; it still didn't take Bonnie much longer than a second to recognize Matilda. She moved like a dancer as well as looked like one, and Bonnie wondered what she had wanted to be before someone had killed her and let her back up again.

Matilda drove her fist into the blue-eyed bastard's throat and then his solar-plexus, bam-bam, doubling him over and making him gag out something that looked suspiciously like half-digested blood into the puddles at his feet. He straightened back up again almost immediately afterwards and backhanded Matilda off of her feet so hard that she left a long skid mark through the mud to park her progress as she landed. His features were softer than Damon's even as their coloring was the same, but Bonnie still thought that the things he was doing with them now were nearly obscene.

"Do you have a _pheromone_ or something?" he asked Bonnie as he rounded on her again. Bonnie took a deep breath, drew together every last scrap of magic that she had left in her body, and swore that if she could do nothing else then she was at a bare minimum going to make certain that her blood burned all the way down.

She had to have _something_ left in her. She _had_ to. Bonnie lowered her chin and squeezed her eyes tight shut, reached down deep inside of herself. She barely even felt the rain pelting down across her face. If she had fire, or sunlight, or, hell, she would even settle for being able to levitate a pencil right at the moment. The blue-eyed bastard was the only one immune to the sun, the rest of them were just getting lucky, if she could just...

Bonnie was focusing so hard that she barely noticed when the rain stopped hitting her, though her eyes flew open once she started to hear screams. She started to lunge back up to her feet, fell into the mud again as her legs let her know that they weren't there yet, watched as every vampire attacking Damon burst into flames from the bright, bright sunshine that had burst through the moody clouds. Damon let out an obscenity that Bonnie could hear from where she stood and rolled away, letting the mud and the puddles put out the few sparks that actually landed on him. Matilda yelped something similar and scrambled for the same shadowy place that had sheltered Damon a day before, seeming to make it there with only minimal damage. Bonnie could feel her mouth falling open. No Bennett witch had ever been strong enough to control the weather before, not even Emily herself, and the sun was still blazing bright and strong up in the sky even though Bonnie hadn't gathered herself together nearly enough to attempt a spell.

That was when she noticed three figures standing together, formed of the steam that was rising up from the soaked ground and the smoke of vampire corpses and vaguely woman-shaped. Two of them were still familiar, one of them so much that Bonnie made another aborted attempt to leap to her feet, and the third was staring off in the direction that Matilda had gone.

Damon flinched instinctively from the bright sunlight before he realized that Bonnie's stone was still holding, and then a smile that would have told anyone in his right mind to run like hell and not come back again started spreading across his face. He and the blue-eyed bastard slammed into one another in a snarling rush that looked more like wolves attacking one another than men. Damon had lost both stakes at some point during his melee with the rest of the vampires, and the blue-eyed bastard had none at all, so they were left to tear at one another with nothing more than fists and teeth. From where Bonnie was sitting, they seemed to be doing a fairly effective job of it, too. Damon was clearly tired and still had a half-dozen healing wounds scattered across his body; Bonnie reached down so deep that she felt her ears pop and set fire to the blue-eyed bastard's shirt sleeve. He leapt back, yelling, while Damon refused to let him go more than a foot or so before grabbing the same arm and snapping it with a sound that reverberated all the way back to Bonnie.

"You have something of mine," Damon growled right up against the blue-eyed bastard's face. Bonnie saw a gleam of blue metal on the far side of the construction site, noticeable now only because there was no longer such a hard rain falling that seeing things more than a dozen feet off was impossible. She called Damon's name and pointed. "And you have something of hers, too." He rummaged about in the blue-eyed bastard's pockets until he came up with the key to the Prius and flicked it Bonnie's way before he dragged the spitting, struggling vampire over to the very same well that they had spent a morning in before. It was only there that he noticed the trio of misty figures, startling so hard that he nearly lost his grip upon the blue-eyed bastard. Damon dipped his chin slightly, towards one or all of them Bonnie had no way of knowing, before he looked to her.

"Well, m'lady?" Damon asked her in a voice that came out slightly distorted around his eager fangs.

Bonnie lifted her chin. "Do it," she said. Damon snapped the blue-eyed bastards finger with such a loud sound that Bonnie thought for a second that he had taken it completely off, wrenched the ring free, and then dropped the other vampire into the depths of the well. Bonnie didn't hear him hit the bottom. She was pretty sure that that was due to the flames brought forth from the high noon sun getting to him first, though this time she didn't need to see it, knowing that it had been served was enough.

"Okay," she said softly to the misty figures while Damon slipped his ring back onto his finger. "It's okay, I think I got this." Two seconds later, the sun was gone, so were they, and the rain was pouring down again. Bonnie pushed herself slowly back up, her legs now shaky for an entirely different reason. She went to Matilda, who was still staring in the direction of where the figures had been. Bonnie had a good feeling that Matilda only cared about the one of them; Matilda ignored Bonnie's hand for a good three seconds before she took it and allowed herself to be helped up.

"That was--" Matilda pressed her lips together, shook her head, and pulled her hoodie back over her hair again.

Bonnie almost did it then, but Damon touched her lightly in the small of her back before pointing in the direction where Bonnie's inferno still glowed. She could hear police sirens when she listened carefully.

"Thank you," she told Matilda, meaning every word.

Matilda seemed to realize that she was holding Bonnie's hand and extricated herself with an over-exaggerated care, as if she were afraid of what she might do to Bonnie if she forgot for a second that she was a vampire. Her hands were shaking nearly as badly as Bonnie's. "You're not the mystery that you think you are," she said. "Wasn't hard to figure out where you were going."

The sleeve of Bonnie's jacket had fallen down, hiding the bracelet. She said, "Come on, let us give you a ride home."

End Part Fourteen


	15. Chapter 15

Part Fifteen

Bonnie and Damon left Matilda at her house, where she wished them with great sincerity that she would never have to lay eyes upon either of them again. Back at the motel, Bonnie washed great clots of mud out of her hair, had herself a good cry in the shower, and then told Damon in no uncertain terms that they might only have one room, but sleeping was all that she intended to do that night. She stumbled into the bed and didn't expect to move again until it was well into the next morning, but her dreams were troubled and her sleep uneven. Bonnie startled awake more than once to jump even harder when Damon's calf was thrown over hers, or her arm about his waist, and him seeming to be sleeping just as deeply as she needed to.

"I'm not going to bite you," Damon murmured after the third time, not bothering to open his eyes. "I promised."

"You did." Bonnie put her hand against the side of Damon's face and turned it towards hers. How it was that he could breathe, sweat, and have stubble over his cheeks while still being so cool was something that Bonnie was always going to have trouble with. Damon opened his eyes just far enough for Bonnie to see the blue glimmering while she looked him over, even knowing that all of his wounds had sealed themselves up again almost as soon as they had been inflicted. She patted lightly at his cheek, turned over, and slipped asleep again before she could realize that she had just thought of Damon and herself as a thing that was going to keep happening, even when they were back in Mystic Falls and the adventure completely over.

Bonnie woke up the next morning with a very different kind of soreness than the one she was becoming accustomed, and with an ache behind her eyes suggestive of either a raging bonfire party or a hard night of studying. At least then she would have had a lot of fun or a good grade to show Dad and Grams. She had killed a lot of vampires, though, and saved a lot of people, even if none of them knew it yet. Grams would have been pleased to know that, if by some wild chance what had happened the day before was an identical hallucination shared across three people. Bonnie knew that she would have.

She and Damon spoke little as they each dressed and repacked their things; Bonnie wondered if his thoughts were traveling down the same path as hers were. The second that they stepped foot back in Mystic Falls, his promises to her were finished, and so were hers to him. _Back into the wild, wild west._ She had already killed a whole nest of vampires who had barely done a thing to her. Killing this one...was really going to suck, if he forced her into it. Not something that she would have ever found herself thinking while she had first been rolling out of town with Damon Salvatore in her passenger seat.

"We need to make a stop on the way," Bonnie announced without explanation as she threw her bags into the backseat. Damon, for once, didn't run his mouth about it. Bonnie had a feeling that he already knew. Well, it wasn't as if he had any room to talk about doing completely insane things for the sake of family. Bonnie didn't knock on Matilda's door and thus wasn't sure if she was even awake inside the house and listening to Bonnie's footsteps coming up the porch. She had looked beyond exhausted herself when they had taken her back to her house, hurting from a half-dozen small sunlight burns that she wasn't able to prevent and too irritable to accept Bonnie's thanks to her as sincere. Maybe she would think differently of the slim white jewelry box, just the right size for holding a bracelet, that Bonnie set down on her front doorstep before turning and walking away.

Damon was out of the car and leaning up against the driver's door when Bonnie walked back across the lawn, twirling her car key idly around his finger. "Oh, hell no," Bonnie said, and grabbed his wrist so that she could snatch it from him. "Seriously, Damon, when are you going to learn that you are _not_ in the driver's seat on this little adventure?" She maybe held onto his wrist for a little bit longer than she needed to, and he maybe noticed it.

"I figure that we only have about eight hundred miles left," he answered her. "Might as well savor it."

"Might as well." Bonnie got back into the driver's seat, put the key into the ignition. "Please, please do not make me kill you," she whispered in a low enough voice that she was not sure that even Damon's ears could pick it up as he slid back into the passenger's side.

The pre-paid cell phone started ringing in her jacket pocket as they pulled away from the curb. "God, you watch, my dad has somehow gotten this number," Bonnie said she dove for it and nearly side-swiped a Volvo. "I'm not going to see daylight for a year after we get back."

Damon put his knees up against the dashboard and gave her that _look_ of his, clearly nonplussed by the major wreck that she had just narrowly avoided. "Most vampires seem to do just fine without it," he said.

"Did I say anything about being able to see nighttime, either? I'm talking about four walls and bread and water." Bonnie answered the phone and right away knew that something was wrong, because the person on the other end of the line was crying. "Elena?" Damon straightened and took his knees down from the dashboard immediately. "What is it, what's happened?"

Elena pulled herself together long enough to say, "It's Jeremy."

*  
Bonnie stayed behind the wheel on the way back to Mystic Falls. Damon didn't even bitch about how he could have gotten them there faster, mostly due to the fact that Bonnie thought she could count on one hand the number of times that her foot even went near the brake. They passed the town limit sign shortly before sunset and by some minor miracle managed not to either pass a cop that Bonnie would have to magic straight into next week or run over an intern as she brought the Prius into an Andretti stop in the very first parking space that she saw at the hospital. Damon didn't vampire-flash inside and leave her there to follow at her own human pace, but Bonnie thought that it was a near thing. His hand was in the small of her back as they entered the ICU; Bonnie honestly could not say how long it had been there before she had noticed. Elena was pacing back and forth in front of Jeremy's room, arms crossed over her chest and her face wet; Stefan was quietly shadowing her movements so that he was never further than a foot away if he should be needed. Through the room's blinds, Bonnie saw Jenna sitting by the bed with her elbow propped up on the armrest and her head in her hand.

"Oh, God, Bonnie," Elena said as soon as she caught sight of her. They hugged each other so hard that Bonnie thought it a good thing they were already in a hospital in case one or both of them should break the other's ribs. Over each girl's shoulders, Damon and Stefan regarded each other without speaking.

"I am so, so sorry, Elena," Bonnie whispered. "What happened?"

Elena let go of Bonnie and swiped at each of her eyes, making a visible effort to pull herself back together. Bonnie thought that that was the primary reason Elena had stepped out of Jeremy's room in the first place. "He overdosed on my leftover pain pills from last summer," she said. Bonnie put her hand over her mouth. "And it wasn't--I hate saying this, but Jeremy knows how to use, okay? He knows how much to take. Stefan found a vial in his room that smelled like vampire blood--"

"He was trying to turn," Damon finished in the kind of emotionless tone that he adopted when he wanted no one other than himself to know what was really going on inside. Bonnie looked up at him, but he was succeeding in his goal, and she realized for the first time that his hand was upon her shoulder. She hadn't noticed him putting it there. Even though she surely already knew this, Elena still blanched before she nodded. "Did his heart stop? Even for a minute?"

"No." Stefan looked and sounded tired, though Bonnie saw his eyes going to Damon's on her shoulder and wondered how long he had realized that it was there before she had. "I was--near enough the ambulance to keep an ear out." Bonnie had a sudden image of him riding the hood like something out of _Teen Wolf_.

"Then we're all standing around like it's his funeral why?" Bonnie removed Damon's hand from her shoulder so that she could kick him sharply in the shin, and he made a face at her. Stefan wasn't the only one who looked back and forth between the two of them with visible wheels turning that time. "Hey, you agreed to play nice." _But we're back in Mystic Falls now,_ Bonnie thought and did not say. Damon went on, "I can hear his heartbeat from here, it's strong. If they've already pumped his stomach, then it's not going to stop anytime soon."

"Once again, Damon, you are the master of sensitivity." Elena was clearly only pretending to be herself, but pretending was better than nothing. She rubbed at her eyes again. "It gets worse. Uncle John was murdered tonight in the kitchen. Someone cut his fingers off--" Damon went straighter behind Bonnie. "And then stabbed him to death. And then Jeremy tries to commit suicide upstairs--"

"Jeremy would _never_ do something like that," Bonnie said fiercely. She reached for Elena's hand and squeezed until her fingers ached.

"I know that!" Elena's eyes flashed. _That_ was Bonnie's Original Recipe BFF there, no pretending required. "But without knowing who or what else actually killed Uncle John, it looks--really bad. Jenna's had to nearly throw down with the deputies a few times, and I'm pretty sure that the only reason that Sheriff Forbes isn't here herself is because of Caroline."

"What happened to Caroline?"

"She was in a car wreck," Stefan said with a calmness that was clearly meant to be soothing rather than uncaring, though Bonnie wasn't quite sure that she was in the mood to distinguish. He wrapped his arms around Elena's abdomen and pulled her close to him, and she put her hand against his forearm. "There was some internal bleeding, but they got it stopped. She's going to be okay."

For the second time in less than thirty-six hours, Bonnie felt shaky on her feet, and now that their arrangement had run its course she wasn't certain that Damon was going to catch her, either. She made her way to one of the chairs lining the hallway and sat. "Why do I get the feeling that there's a whole book's worth of things that happened while I was gone?"

"Because my brother is damned lucky that he was too young to be recruited as a spy when he died?" Damon asked, scrutinizing Stefan closely.

"Damon, why don't we get the girls some coffee?" Stefan asked in a deceptively casual tone of voice. Bonnie narrowed her eyes before she noticed that Damon was doing the same thing.

"I'd like that," she said, figuring that her odds were better if she had a few minutes with Elena alone. "Please."

Damon looked at her with tilted head and said, "You sure you still want to be up on that pedestal, sweetheart?"

"It's the only way that I can look you in the eyes," Bonnie answered. "You're too damned tall, Damon." Damon's mouth twitched, but there was still clearly something being said between himself and his brother in their own private language as the two of them walked off down the hall together.

"They won't actually wave their dicks at each other in the cafeteria, will they?" she asked once they were out of sight but still near enough that she had no doubt in Damon's ability to hear her.

Elena gave Bonnie's sad attempt at humor only the dutiful chuckle that it deserved. "Damon might. Stefan's surprisingly easy to embarrass." She reached for Bonnie's hand again while taking her own seat, and Bonnie held on tight. "Stefan told me what you said to him, about Damon going along because of what the tomb vampires did to him. Thank you, he needed that." Bonnie wasn't sure if Elena was referring to Damon or Stefan.

She held onto Elena's hand while Elena craned her neck to look back through the room's window. "What else happened while I was gone, Elena?"

"The tomb vampires," Elena sighed. Bonnie felt very cold all over, and barely realized that she was still holding onto Elena's hand. "They came back and attacked the town yesterday during Founder's Day."

The tomb vampires had come back to Mystic Falls. She had gone on this whole trip, and they had just come back--she had maybe even driven them back herself when word got out that a Bennett and a Salvatore were killing as many vampires as they could find together--

Around lips that she couldn't entirely feel, Bonnie asked, "How many people did they kill?"

"None. No one." Elena shook her head and didn't seem to notice when Bonnie's entire body loosened by a half turn and she sagged back into her chair. "There was this thing that Uncle John stole from Damon and Stefan's house, and it made a noise that was like a dog whistle to them--if Mr. Saltzman hadn't been there, they would have gotten Stefan, too--but all of the tomb vampires are dead. They were burned in my dad's old office."

"Good." Bonnie nodded before asking herself if she really meant it, since she hadn't been there to deliver the blow herself. It was barely a second before she nodded again. "Good."

"Good," Elena echoed. She sank back a little further in her chair, arms over her chest. "I'm starting to feel like I've gotten so used to vampires in my life that sometimes I forget what monsters most of them are."

It was taking Stefan and Damon a damned long time to get coffee unless they really had stopped somewhere along the way for that dick-waving contest, metaphorical or otherwise. Bonnie looked off in the direction that they had gone before she reclaimed Elena's hand and said, "We'll keep each other honest."

Elena squeezed back and said, "I'm really glad you're back, Bonnie."

Jenna stepped out of Jeremy's room, closing the door quietly behind her. There were dark circles under her eyes that would not have looked out of place in a horror movie. "He only woke up for a few moments, and I don't think that he really knows what's going on, but--" She stopped short when she noticed Bonnie sitting there. Bonnie raised her hand in a sheepish wave while the reasonable adult and the not-that-far-gone teenager visibly warred across Jenna's face. Ultimately, Jenna pointed the no-nonsense finger that Bonnie knew far too well from both her father and Grams in Bonnie's direction and said, "In the interest of Elena, I will give you one hour before you call your father."

"Thanks, Jenna," Elena said quietly. She was still gripping Bonnie's hand tight enough to hurt, and Bonnie didn't think that Jenna was lying when she said that sake of Elena was the only reason that her father wasn't descending upon her head right at this very moment.

Jenna's mouth was still a disapproving shape that she probably wouldn't have liked to see in the mirror, but she said, "I'm going to go splash some water on my face. Elena, do you want to--?"

"Yeah," Elena said immediately, rising to her feet. She still looked nervous, though, and Bonnie wondered how much of it had to do with things that had transpired while she had been gone and how much of it she had been here for while she and Elena had still been doing an awkward little dance around each other.

"Okay." Jenna went down the hallway, but she still threw a look over her shoulder at Bonnie which suggested that if she knew what was good for her, she wouldn't make Jenna wait the whole hour before she called her father herself. _Trust me, I know._

"Do you want me to go in with you?" Bonnie asked Elena. Elena looked tempted to take her up on the offer before she squared her shoulders and shook her head.

"No. Jeremy and I have a lot to hash out, and it's best if we keep it between us. I might be about to do some very gentle, very sisterly yelling, whether he remembers it in the morning or not."

Bonnie pulled Elena into a hard hug. "I'm going to go see where the boys are with the coffee and check on Caroline. Holler if you need me." She watched Elena enter Jeremy's room and take a seat by the bed before she turned in the direction where she had last seen Damon and Stefan going. The Mystic Falls ICU wasn't that large, and it wasn't long before she was able to find a nurse to tell her where Caroline Forbes' room was, even if she did have to solemnly promise not to sneak in after visiting hours. She was more surprised to find Damon leaving just as she was coming upon it, taking great care to shut the door so as to not wake up Sheriff Forbes curled up in a chair inside. She looked as if she had not so settled down to rest so much as she had simply collapsed. Through the window, Bonnie watched as Caroline fidgeted for a moment with her IV line and then shifted back into sleep. Her pale yellow hair was sticking out in directions that would have mortified her if she had been aware of it, and there was a dark bruise that no visit to Sephora was going to cover spreading across her cheek.

"What did you say to her?" Bonnie asked Damon immediately, more threateningly than she had intended. There was definitely a rebuke in the coffee that Damon shoved into her hand.

"Did you know that she prattles even more when she's on morphine? Really helps to cut down on the tender bonding bullshit," he answered. Bonnie could only put one hand on her hip unless she wanted to pour scalding hot coffee down her thigh, but she thought she did a pretty good job of looking imposing all the same. Damon rolled his eyes. "It doesn't matter. Nothing that she's going to remember in the morning and, no, I didn't compel her. A deal's a deal, remember?"

That deal had expired when they had passed the Mystic Falls town limits, but Damon looked tired and unsettled, and if something fragile had happened in Caroline's room then Bonnie didn't want to be the one to breathe upon it too hard and break it.

"What's wrong?" Bonnie asked.

Damon startled so briefly and subtly that Bonnie probably wouldn't have known it the week before and then rubbed at the back of his neck. Now, that she _would_ have noticed, but it likely didn't say anything good that Damon had been thrown off his game badly enough that he was giving overt signals of having actual human-like responses. "If Jeremy didn't kill John," he started.

"Jeremy didn't kill John," Bonnie said in a tone that brooked no argument.

Damon rolled his eyes and held up his hand to stave her off. There was a gleam of silver about his finger, and Bonnie realized that he was wearing the wolf ring that she had gotten for him. She couldn't remember if he had also been wearing it when they had come into the hospital or on the drive back, but that had mostly been a blur of trying to avoid cops and wondering if it would really be all that bad to let Damon compel someone just the once. (Answer: yes. Would she have still let it slide just this once if it had meant that they got back to Elena faster? Definitely not a multiple choice answer.)

"Easy, sweetheart, I'm not arguing with you," he said. "But _since_ Jeremy doesn't have it in him to kill someone like that, then we're looking for someone who could get in and get out without breaking a single window or lock and without Jenna being any the wiser that that there was someone else in the house with her."

"A vampire," Bonnie said, realizing. The thought didn't panic her like it would have once; whatever she had to do would be done, and that was just the end of it. "Who had to have been invited in."

"And can still get inside now," Damon confirmed. "No one is safe in that house until it's dealt with."

"Interesting pronoun from someone who started out giving me lectures on how vampires are people, too," Bonnie said dryly. She grabbed for Damon's hand before he could smart off at her, ran her finger lightly across the silver of his ring. He was wearing it on the opposite hand as the lapis lazuli one that protected him from the sun, and the metal stayed cool until she started to warm it with her own human contact. "So, whatever. We have two vampires and a witch on the case. One measly-peasly little vampire is going to turn out to be nothing."

"From the witch who's probably going to spend the next year in a Catholic schoolgirl's outfit," Damon said.

"Not my kink, and if you're seriously thinking that I'm going to let a little thing like parental disapproval stop me from protecting my friends, then you obviously haven't been paying attention." Damon still looked deeper within his own head than was probably a good thing to see unless Bonnie wanted to start planning for mayhem to follow shortly afterwards, so she set her coffee carefully down on the chair outside of Caroline's room and grabbed Damon by the front of his shirt. He followed her willingly enough as Bonnie dragged him in the direction of the first likely door that she saw, and even made a small, pleased noise from the back of his throat when he saw where they were going.

"A supply closet?" Damon asked. "Really? I never would have figured you for such a cliche."

Bonnie grabbed both of Damon's wrists, pinned them up as high as she could reach and said firmly, "Damon, it's shutting up time now." He didn't seem to disagree when the end result of his not running his mouth for once was Bonnie kissing him hard and like a promise, feeling some of the tension running out of his body and into hers because she could take it. Never had she thought that she would be in the position of reassuring a vampire by taking control of the situation away from him, and neither had she thought that she would find herself liking it so much. She tightened her grip when Damon flexed his wrists and seemed inclined to break free and take things to a further level, murmuring, "I like you like this."

If anything, Damon relaxed against her even further, making Bonnie think, _There's something else he's afraid of that he's not telling me yet._ Or at the very least that he suspected, or suspected that Stefan suspected, and Bonnie had really hoped not to be drawn this far down the rabbit hole into vampire problems with Elena, but she guessed that it was only fair after she had taken a vampire so deeply into her own. He stopped returning Bonnie's kisses long enough to blow a soft stream of air across her ear, her neck, as he bowed his head and very nearly rested it against her shoulder.

"Just so you know," Bonnie said to him, letting go of his wrists and taking him by the chin so that he was looking her in the eye, "that first thing we worked out still holds. No killing humans, no compulsion. I don't want to have to stop you." Hell of it being that she really, really didn't. "But I absolutely will if I have to."

"You're shit at this whole seduction thing."

"I didn't recall you needing to be seduced all that hard." Bonnie tightened her grip on Damon's chin until he looked at her again and knew that she was serious. "I mean it. Don't make me go there." She let go of him so that she could lean forward and bite his lower lip, hard enough to make him startle before vampire healing took over and eased away the tiny hurt. "As for the rest of it, up to you."

"You are never going to stop being a pain in the ass about this free will thing, I can already tell." But Damon had his hands about her waist, and he was leaning in and looking more relaxed than Bonnie had seen him since Elena had called them both.

"Among us humans, that free will thing is kinda a big deal." Bonnie snorted. "And while you might frequently _need_ to be put on a leash--" Damon's eyes darkened, oh, God help them both. "I want you to ask me for it."

Damon huffed out a soft breath, leaned close, and still didn't kiss Bonnie until she tipped up her chin in a silent command. He took his time with her mouth until Bonnie grabbed him by the back of his neck and made a frustrated noise, lowered his attentions almost negligently down to her neck. Bonnie could feel that her pulse didn't flutter any harder, and that that frustrated him, and that he liked that it frustrated him. He never had been one to ignore a challenge, she was willing to bet. Damon's hands fell down to her jeans, just about the surest way that he had of getting her attention outside of running his mouth, and they had plenty of uses for that, too. Bonnie had the rare experience of actually seeing Damon Salvatore startled when she slapped his hands away.

"Shh," she said before he could speak. "Not a talking time."

"Ma'am, yes, ma'am," Damon said, which was why Bonnie was maybe a little rougher than she had to be when she took him in hand and stroked him off, running her nails under his shirt and against the skin of his abdomen just hard enough to remind him that she was still there and that she would keep her promises, every last one of them. She didn't know if Damon got it, didn't know if he caught it as a reassurance or as a threat, but he made a low sound as he came and suckled a dark spot in the side of her neck that she swore he did just to see if she could either magic or makeup it away before she had to explain it to her father.

"You are a son of a bitch," Bonnie said, pushing him in the chest as she went to look for something in the closet with which to clean up her hand. Damon didn't let her get far before he was tugging her back with the hand wearing the wolf ring; she could feel it warming at her touch in a way that it would never manage with vampire skin alone. _Whatever it is that you know or think you know, I got it,_ Bonnie thought, didn't know whether she meant it to be soothing or not until her body was pressed up against Damon's and, even though he was the one resting his back against the wall, she could feel him leaning up against her very subtly.

"Already told you," Damon said against her ear as Bonnie grabbed his wrists again and figured up in her head that she had maybe thirty minutes, maybe as little as twenty, with which to check on Caroline and re-check on Elena before the hour that Jenna had given her ran out. "It suits me."

End


End file.
